Joan of Arc, Helen Castor

I originally requested this as an ARC from Netgalley, because I enjoyed Helen Castor’s She-Wolves, but I never got round to it in time and ended up buying the book recently. This is a bit too dry to be a story, but Castor certainly “pick[ed her] way through the evidence, choosing what to weave into a seamless story”. It doesn’t spend much time in the narrative on talking about conflicting testimony, apocryphal stories, etc — I’m left not quite sure how sure Castor is about some of the events she describes. The notes are pretty extensive though, with plenty of references for anyone with the patience to follow up on it.

As with She-Wolves, this is a pretty readable book, and Castor manages to bring across Joan’s indomitable spirit, her conviction, and, yeah, her sassiness. From the records we have, it seems that we have a pretty consistent picture of Joan as a pious girl who believed wholly in what she was doing, and that she was heaven-sent to fulfil her mission.

One thing I wondered, though — would we treat her any better today? People talk about how badly she was treated, particularly when in Anglo-French custody but also in the endless requests to prove herself and her virginity. But we’d treat her as mad today, not venerate her. Mind you don’t take Joan the hero and act ‘holier than thou’ about the medieval people who condemned her. You likely would too, though for different reasons, however pretty and sassy and self-confident she was.

Rating: 4/5

The Deadly Sisterhood, Leonie Frieda

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while, given how epic Caterina Sforza is in the Assassin’s Creed games. I have read a biography of Caterina herself (Tigress of Forli, by Elizabeth Lev), so I didn’t read this so much for her as for the other women in its pages. I found it a little disorganised, really; it isn’t neatly divided into eight sections, and it’s sometimes hard to see exactly which woman is the key player. And Frieda is claiming to deal with women as key players in Renaissance Italy, and yet Clarice Orsini is exactly what the back blurb says these women are not, a “passive bystander”.

In fact, there’s a whole section that’s primarily about Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pazzi Conspiracy. Which, shrug. Not what I’m here for, actually.

It’s a readable enough book, but there’s oddly judgemental bits about the women’s weight or appearance, or indeed intelligence if they’re not one of the precious women we’re supposed to view as a sisterhood, and it’s not very well proofread at all. Without looking for it, I found four typos in casual reading. Gah.

Rating: 3/5

Darwin’s Lost World, Martin Brasier

When I picked this up, I didn’t really register that I’d been disappointed by one of the author’s other books. Good thing it was a library book, because though the topic of the most ancient remains of life is fascinating, Brasier’s account jumps around geologically and logically. There’s no straight progression from idea to idea, era to era, area to area. I kept losing track of where a fossil was and how old it was thought to be, and getting distracted by Brasier’s anecdotes (almost boasting) about places he’d been looking for fossils.

Also, I don’t know if Brasier is English or Welsh or what, but my teeth started slowly grinding when he brought in Arthurian analogies. Arthur never looked for the grail, never. It’s the same issue with basic facts that I found in Secret Chambers when he repeated common apocryphal stories as fact, except even more personally annoying because this is Arthur and I spent most of my degree studying Arthur as deeply as Brasier studies fossils. It’s an idiosyncratic reaction, I know, but it was still annoying. The Arthurian stuff felt weird, shoehorned in, especially when Brasier was doing research for Oxford University in Scotland. I could understand it more if he was a fellow of a Welsh university or something.

Rating: 2/5

The Hemlock Cup, Bettany Hughes

I got Bettany Hughes’ books because when I graduated from my BA, she was awarded an honorary fellowship by my university. So naturally, after her speech, I was curious about her work. My problem with her book on Helen of Troy was mostly the organisation, and I had that problem again too; she begins at the end of Socrates’ life, jumps forward and back with foreshadowing, tells you about people’s deaths and then mentions them again a few pages later…

I can also imagine that a lot of people would find it a dry read. I found Socrates fascinating, learning about his character; I was sometimes doubtful about how Hughes could really have pieced together certain details about him. There’s plenty of references and so on in the back of the book, but then there’s also careless mistakes like referring to Elektra and Ismene’s brothers. (It’s Antigone, not Elektra. Wrong tragedy, wrong tragedian.) That makes me a little unsure of how to take it all — and of course, Socrates didn’t write down his philosophy in the way that Plato or Aristotle did, so everything we have is second or third hand anyway.

An interesting book, at any rate, but not as fascinating as the one on Helen. I actually read it while reading Jo Walton’s The Just City, to which it makes an interesting non-fictional companion!

Rating: 3/5

Otter Country, Miriam Darlington

Otter Country is really a personal account of an obsession with otters, like H is for Hawk or Crow Country. In many ways, it’s more about Darlington than it is about otters, though her eyes are open to the significance of otters in their own environment, to their struggles and their slow recovery over recent years. I felt a little left out, since I haven’t read Ring of Bright Water — which I know we have in the local library, as it survived our last cull, so I’ll probably give it a go when I get the chance.

There are some beautiful descriptions, etc, but sometimes I found myself rolling my eyes rather at the ideas Darlington took into her head, like that it would be a good idea to take her clothes off and jump into the burn during midge season.

Rating: 2/5

The Secret Museum, Molly Oldfield

This book looks like it’d make a great coffee table book, and in a way it is part of that genre of bite-size, digestible bits of culture. But it’s lacking in the lavish pictures I’d expect from such a thing: many of the items are represented by photographs the size of a postage stamp, or just sketches. The book itself looks nice, but it’s not the most visually orientated; I assume that’s because many of these objects are too precious to photograph. With some of them, I wasn’t sure she should even be describing their locations so clearly!

It’s an eclectic collection of objects, in no real order. I can imagine that being very frustrating to anyone a little more serious about this than I am; I did enjoy browsing through the selection, though, dipping in and out as each object interested me more or less. I liked that these precious objects aren’t all of monetary value, often being more valuable as a link to the past or a symbol of an era.

It’s interesting in its randomness, rather like watching an episode of QI, which Molly Oldfield writes for. Probably frustrating, too, if that’s not your thing.

Rating: 3/5

The Spark of Life, Frances Ashcroft

Since I’m in the middle of my female authors only month, I thought now would be a good time to get round to some of the non-fiction books I have by women, especially in the STEM field. I’d forgotten I had this one, which is a shame: it fits into my general theme of reading about neurology, and builds on a lot of the stuff about ion channels that I learnt in an introductory biology class on Coursera. I understood pretty much all the science without wanting or needing to look anything up, or letting anything wash over my head: in part, that’s because Ashcroft writes very accessibly, but I think it is also because this is stuff I know and love.

Some of it is a little too much towards the neurology end of things for me. I wanted more about electricity in the human body — more of the sparks — and less of the chemical messages (the soups, in that old scientific debate); this veered towards talking much more about the chemical parts of the process, especially toward the end. On the other hand, it’s the chemical processes that create the electrical potentials and make all of the electricity in the human body (and other animals too) possible, so it’s quite inextricable. It just felt like it wandered.

Calling the book The Spark of Life is a little misleading, perhaps. It talks about electricity in the body, yeah, but that’s too small a part of the process to be considered alone, and a lot of other factors have to be discussed at quite some length. Ashcroft uses good examples, and explains things clearly; there’s a section of notes in the back for those who want to get a little deeper into it.

Rating: 4/5