The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways was, for me, a bit like reading Richard Fortey’s work. Non-fiction that I’m not necessarily very interested in, but which is beautifully written, lyrical, literate. It wasn’t boring at all — meditative, perhaps. Sometimes Macfarlane’s a little too airy and mystical for me, too caught up in his imagination, but sometimes he comes round to something like Fortey, like the book I read recently on meditation, like Francis Pryor’s book about Seahenge and the ritual landscape.

I’m not particularly a walker myself, not now. As a kid I walked quite a lot with my grandfather, who would never have been nearly as poetic about walking as Macfarlane. It’s walking in the mountains in Wales that speaks to me, the hot still space at a ford where you could turn down toward home or go on toward a blackberry field, flies swarming on the evidence that a horse had come through earlier that day. Not a trek across chalk or snow or fen land: not this quasi-mystical experience of the landscape-as-self, just a walk on a warm day with blackberries in the middle and a scolding for getting so dusty/muddy at the end. If we went further afield, a hand-drawn map with “Grandma fell here” or some such comment to immortalise the trip.

Still, I can appreciate the sentiment behind this, and the lyrical writing. It just gets a bit too caught up in itself for me.

Rating: 3/5

Words in Time and Place, David Crystal
Received to review via Netgalley

I’m surprised at other people actually reading this cover to cover in only a couple of sittings: for me it was much more the type of book that you dip in and out of. A curiosity, but not something deeply riveting. Trivia, I suppose. I did find Crystal’s introduction to the whole book and to each chapter interesting, but the lists and lists of words are rather hard to just sit and read, for me — it’d be like reading a dictionary or thesaurus for fun; it can be interesting to look up particular things, but I don’t know anyone (as far as I’m aware!) who’ll sit and read straight through.

For me, it was particularly interesting because it puts some Old/Middle English expressions in a better context than the simple translating dictionaries ever did, and makes some surprising links between the years and other languages. Though I think if he’d gone to Anglo-Saxon poetry, he’d have found some more fun ones for his section on death: I’m fond of ‘sweordum answefede’ (put to sleep by swords), which caused some consternation in class when we were trying to translate it.

Rating: 3/5

Seahenge, Francis Pryor

Archaeology is not some exact science, with answers to give to every question if we only look hard enough. It’s partly our own fault: we’re overpopulating the Earth, and in the meantime we’re destroying great swathes of the archaeological record. We only have fragments of the past, some larger than others — Seahenge being one of the latter, far ahead of potsherds but perhaps more mysterious — and while archaeology has some light to shed, I find it best to accept up front that no one can offer a complete answer, and that if anyone claims to be certain, they’re speaking beyond the evidence in almost every case.

Francis Pryor’s book handles this pretty well, in my books, though I have no doubt there’s people out there who wish he’d stop equivocating. Much of this book involves setting this in context, linking modern and ancient lives and landscapes, and then using what evidence that offers to spin theories — theories that could be upset by the next find out of the ground, in some obscure peaty corner or air-tight chamber stumbled upon by chance.

Bearing all that in mind, I found this book fascinating. I have no personal expertise to say yay or nay to any of this — my own research interests lie in a later period, with the dawning of literature, which is in conversation with archaeology more than you’d think — so I took Pryor’s words more or less at face value. Some of his ideas seemed too sketchy, too much based on a gut reaction, but even so his description of the excavations, his impressions of them, the way they came together to synthesise an understanding of the anicent landscape… it’s all fascinating, and I would happily read more.

If you’re looking to learn specifically and solely about the place we’ve dubbed Seahenge (which was not actually built on the beach, and wasn’t in such close proximity to the sea) then only a couple of chapters of this book are of direct interest. But why you would want to look at something like this in isolation when it’s clearly part of a larger story and can only be understood in those terms, I don’t know.

One thing you may feel is that Francis Pryor has too much to say about himself and his team, particularly his wife. I enjoyed it, given that his thought processes were influenced by everything around him. A bare-bones description of the sites and the endless work of extraction and preservation would seem terribly boring to me.

Rating: 4/5

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, Brian Burrell, Dr. Allan Ropper
Received to review via NetGalley

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is a really fascinating book. It’s a little fictionalised, so we get dialogues and little portraits of character, enough that we can care about the cases discussed. Dr Ropper is pretty much everything an ideal doctor should be: knowledgeable, capable of acting fast, capable of explaining complex processes clearly, intuitive, willing to listen, willing to admit he’s wrong… At every stage, he emphasises to the reader and to the residents he’s teaching that each case is individual, that the right answer for one person isn’t the right one for the next, and so on.

There are a couple of very good chapters on Parkinson’s and ALS, some fascinating things like the fact that an ovarian teratoma can cause seizures and all sorts of neurological symptoms, etc. At every turn, it demonstrates the complexity of the brain, the limits of our understanding.

What nearly spoiled it all for me was the fact that Ropper really does revert to talking about hysteria. When I quoted a section to my mother, a psychiatrist, she texted back to ask if the book was written in 1899 — that’s how out of date that section seems. For the most part, he even seems sympathetic to these patients, which is more than I can say for a lot of people who dismiss hysteria/psychosomatic illnesses/conversion disorder, etc. But in this case there seems to be a barrier in his thinking: he sees a young woman with a teddy bear, and he immediately chalks it up to hysteria. Whatever her symptoms: hysteria is the answer. Sure, he dresses it up as “conversion disorder”, but what he means is still pretty much the Victorian hysteria. He uses that term as a direct synonym for conversion disorder, psychosomatic problems, etc.

And it’s exactly that attitude that makes life difficult for people who have mental illnesses, insight and even a glimpse of the way that people are going to look at them. If I’m going into a doctor’s office with some problem, I prepare myself for the inevitable questions about my levels of anxiety, my depression during the last few weeks, is there anything at home I’m struggling with… Because there’s a diagnosis of GAD and depression right there in my file, I know that nine out of ten doctors will listen to my symptoms and hear only psychosomatic. And some of those will even blame me for that — me, the thinking rational person — even though I could no more help it than I could pick the stars out of the sky.

I started having horrible stomach pains in 2010, my second year of university, at the same time as I started a pretty steep descent into anxiety. Doctors were reasonably sympathetic, but continually told me that what was happening to me, whatever it was, just happened because of my anxiety. Here’s a pill, take it and everything will go away. And I believed them: the pain had to be in my head, because I have an anxiety disorder. I knew they wouldn’t believe in the pain and so I didn’t either.

Even at the point where my physical symptoms were completely blatant, when you could do a physical exam and precisely locate the source of the pain, my GP was reluctant to send me for an ultrasound because, in his opinion, I was probably just stressed about my master’s degree. He repeatedly asked if I was happy, if I was sure I was doing the right thing in my career, while I was trying to ask for pain relief. When eventually I pushed hard enough, he sent me for an ultrasound, warning me that I was wasting everyone’s time.

My gallbladder was packed with stones, and the only option was to remove it.

At one point in this book, Ropper discusses signs and symptoms. Symptoms are what the patient reports; signs are what the physician observes. Don’t stop listening to the symptoms just because you think you can see the signs. Don’t get blinded to one thing because another has already been diagnosed.

Rating: 4/5

Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn

If you’re looking for something about meditation and mindfulness that’s devoid of spiritual interpretations and the like, this is one of the closest approaches I’ve seen that still focused on the meditation aspect and not just generally being “more aware”. It has some helpful suggestions for visualisation, including details not just of picturing things but of feeling things, like his suggestions for standing meditation of imagining yourself as a tree, the part where he mentioned approaching the practice with dignity, etc.

Overall, I doubt it’s going to convince anyone who is highly sceptical to begin with, or help anyone start a practice ex nihilo. But it’s worth reading, and sitting with, and thinking about, if you can put aside scepticism and just try it.

One thing I especially liked was that Kabat-Zinn doesn’t have any thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots about this. There’s recommendations, suggestions, but also reminders that any moment of mindfulness in the day, however short, is valuable.

Rating: 3/5

The Human Age, Diane Ackerman

I got a proof copy of this from Bookbridgr, so I’m not sure how many of the issues are going to be dealt with before the completed book is rolled out. There were still a lot of errors at this stage — a bit where some words were struck out, problems with punctuation, etc. I think the purple prose will be there to stay, though; the writing isn’t terrible, but it’s rather overloaded, and I’m not keen on Ackerman’s flights of imagination. It’s one thing to imagine the trace we’re leaving on the earth for future archaeologists, it’s another to imagine those future archaeologists. That’s science fiction, which I don’t have any argument with, but I don’t tend to like it when that crosses over into my supposed non-fiction.

Ackerman picked an interesting topic, though, and aside from the blizzard of adjectives, this book is an easy read. It’s not a pessimistic humans-are-destroying-the-world sort of book; at one point she mentions the idea of (some) industrial landscapes being beautiful, which is apparently a growing tourist thing in some parts of the world.

Her chapters are short, though her sentences are long, and all in all it’s a quick one. I’m not impressed by her writing style, but I would like to read more on the same topic with a similar outlook.

Rating: 2/5