Naturalist and PhD student Slaght goes to Primorye in remotest Russia in 2006 to research and protect the world’s largest owl, the Blakiston’s fish owl (see excellent pictures in Helen Macdonald’s rave review, here – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/22/owls-of-the-eastern-ice-by-jonathan-c-slaght-review-an-extraordinary-quest). Slaght describes it: “Backlit by the hazy gray of a winter sky, it seemed almost too big and too comical to be a real bird, as if someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear, then propped the dazed beast in the tree.”
This is an account of work at the sharp edge of conservation and research. Slaght is working at a time when local economies are changing rapidly. Logging and free market ventures are expanding into areas of remote and limited fish owl habitat, and it becomes imperative that conservationists work out what the threats are, and what opportunities exist to protect the owl.
This is travel writing as much as nature writing. Slaght conveys how quickly the ancient forest and surrounding environment can change, from conditions that are beautiful and wild to extreme and life-threatening. There are rivers and pools warmed by radon, Amur tigers hunting, hermits and wilderness. Endurance is required to get through the hardships he and his colleagues face in finding, tagging and relocating the owls over several years.
Literally toxic masculinity features, as hunters and others working in the area sometimes engage in extreme drinking to forge trust with strangers like Slaght, who not only is an outsider but also an American and an ornithologist. Several times he’s part of a party that must not break up until the vodka bottle is empty, and sometimes the ‘vodka’ is ethanol. But he gets to work alongside committed lifelong conservationists and assistants, and finds that people will often help him and his colleagues when they need it most.
The owls are known locally as “the owls who ask for a fur coat”. In Russian when a pair sing to each other, it sounds like each is saying “I want a fur coat”. Owls of the Eastern Ice is a truly engrossing and transporting book.
You must be careful when reading this book. You might end up with a shopping list that suddenly includes good vodka, Valtellina cheese, and bushels of fresh tomatoes. I read it on a Sunday afternoon, snacking enjoyably throughout, and had a deeply relaxing time.
Tucci is just as funny, smart and interesting in Taste as he is on his excellent TV show Searching for Italy (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/stanley-tucci-searching-for-italy-restaurants/index.html). He gives an enjoyable account of moments in his life through food, including hilarious dialogue with his family, right the way through to a surprisingly relatable account of being stuck indoors in London with his kids during the first lockdown. Aged about six, watching a food show on television, his mother tells him that the presenter is cooking a duck. He says “A duck?!!!… From a pond?” His mother says “I guess so. I don’t know”.
Dotted throughout are hungry-making recipes. Achievable cocktails accompany grand epics like the timpano (as seen in the movie Big Night), which turns out to have been a source of both joy and stress in the Tucci household over a run of Christmases. Jay Rayner has a smashing time cooking it with Stanley Tucci though (see https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/oct/17/the-day-i-cooked-timpano-with-stanley-tucci-jay-rayner).
Fans of Big Night and Julie and Julia will find cheerful behind the scenes gossip here. Tucci namedrops with abandon, which is the only possible way to do it with style. Ryan Reynolds, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Marcello Mastroianni and endless friends from the world of food pop up. Taste is both thoughtful and sweary, one of my favourite combinations.
I agree that battered family cookware can be heirlooms, as Tucci notes. There are often things that we associate strongly with the important cooks in our lives. A friend’s mum always made toffee in the same tin: it had hammer marks where years of toffee bashing had occurred. These things are precious.
Tucci’s account of his cancer, which leads him to have terrible trouble with food and eating during his treatment and recovery, is moving and important. That food for him is about connecting with others is clear throughout the book, and his deprivation of this key aspect of life during his illness hurts. His joy at surviving and being able to get back to eating with the people he loves leaps off the page.
I suspect that many people will buy this lovely thing for other people this Christmas. Do this by all means, but read it sneakily yourself first. It’s like being on a sunny food holiday with a generous and entertaining friend. We have signed copies!
This new graphic novel and memoir charts historian Rebecca Hall’s search for women rebel slave leaders in archives in the UK and US. It is gripping, moving, and compelling.
Formerly a social justice lawyer, Hall’s work starts in New York in 1999, and Hugo Martínez’s illustrations show the slaving past literally reflected in the city as Hall walks through it. It’s a brilliant way of showing how the past is inescapable in the present. The graphic novel format lends itself to this so well, literally illustrating the similarities in some behaviour and surroundings between then and now. A smartly dressed white man barges into Hall without seeing her, and in a window reflection a white man in a tricorn hat pushes past another Black woman.
There are newly found stories of women-led revolts here, showing that her exhaustive work has paid off, and they are told with deep humanity.
As with Saidiya Hartman’s work on transforming and disrupting the archive, Hall does the work of interrogating why archives are as they are (anyone who loved Wayward Lives and Lose Your Mother will find this essential reading – see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2020/09/23/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-by-saidiya-hartman/). The realisation that current racism and sexism have some of their roots in slavery is manifest. The historian as human is very present – “This work I’m doing is hard, and it hurts.”
Wake gives a vivid account of the difficulty of finding people in official archives when their voices are not recorded, being considered of no importance, or when their only seeming presence is as property. She is also explicit about the UK archives which barred her from access, and those which felt they held nothing about slavery.
Hall describes herself as being haunted by slavery. This really is a haunting book, necessarily violent and painful, showing that hard and committed work by historians can be revolutionary.
I did not expect to laugh out loud while reading a proper scholarly history of the index. But I did, several times. And I now know that the little pointing hand in the margin is a manicule: ☞ (see also https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/manicules).
I did not realise that an index might be more than a handy tool. In the course of Duncan’s account, we find out than an index can be so many other things. For example, a means of revenge, a strange addition to fiction, or a way to satirise an author. We get information on the first things organised by alphabet, the first page numbers, and all kinds of natty anecdotes. One of my favourite bits is 19th century historian J. Horace Round’s extensive diss-fest index entry on his nemesis Professor Edward Freeman, which includes “his ‘certain’ history”, “misconstrues his Latin”, “his failure” and “his special weakness” (p. 14-15).
I am a fan of a good index. They can drive you nuts if they are absent or shoddy. Why would anyone make a travel book without at least a location index? Am I supposed to memorise the location of every café that makes the best bath buns or Black Forest gateaux? One of the most enjoyable I’ve seen recently is the one for Rob Halford’s Confess, in which the Judas Priest frontman’s life is summarised under the entry for Halford, Rob. But this leads to another topic covered in the History, namely the suggestion that students might cheat (gasp) by reading only the index instead of the actual book. Another favourite is in Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming (volume 3 from 1973). He references “royalties, use of”, and this refers to the purchase of his dream pipe organ (see https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html).
Index, A History of the has been added to my list of relaxing and entertaining non-fiction that I have found helpful during the pandemic. During the first lockdown, I realised that the most engaging reading I was doing was well written non-fiction on topics about which I knew nothing (lots of scope here, obviously). Top hits for me were Born to Kvetch, Gathering Moss, and Entangled Life.
Make time to work your way through this book’s own index. It is enormous fun and had me cackling. This is what I’ll be getting for my bookish people for Christmas this year.
Hardback, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20.00, out now
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States for treason in 1953. A married couple, and the parents of two young children, their case became a cause célèbre as a miscarriage of justice, a cultural reference point, and a symbol of US domestic attitudes during the Cold War. Amid all of this, the human story of Ethel Rosenberg has been lost, and this is what Anne Sebba’s engrossing biography corrects.
With access to new information from Ethel’s sons and others who knew her, as well as scrupulous archive research, Sebba meticulously reconstructs the life of this ordinary and extraordinary woman. We find out about her upbringing in a New York Jewish family facing hard times. We are left with the impression of an intelligent, talented and hardworking woman from a difficult family background, who was determined to make her way in life – in education, in singing, as a trade unionist, and as a wife and mother.
The book offers a vivid account of how some Americans came to communism in the 1930s, and how ordinary people started spying for the Soviet Union. Sebba unpicks what Ethel Rosenberg did and didn’t know about the leaking of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and gives a detailed analysis of her trial. She conveys the swirl of McCarthyism and anti-communist fever, and the impact of ingrained anti-Semitism.
Sebba spares us nothing, so it can be a tough read at times, but it is so worthwhile. It is no wonder that the biography has been praised by Claire Tomalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Philippe Sands, among others. Among the moments of light in the frequently grim story that Ethel’s two young children live through, are the moments of solidarity and care shown to them from unexpected quarters (including at one point W. E. B. Du Bois). Outstanding.
I have just had my first swim in a year and a half. It was a completely joyous experience, and I was reminded how important swimming is for me. Many memories of places and people are bound up with it.
Nina Mingya Powles’s essays, collected in Small Bodies of Water, were the perfect thing for me to read just after this memorable swim. She combines memoir with nature writing, weaving strands about family, identity and home through the work. Swimming features, as do sensory delights of food and travel. Her essay on cold water swimming, Ache, was one of my favourites. She is a generous writer, sharing experiences with us, even painful things like personal and shocking experiences of racism.
Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, spending time in China and now living in London, the author’s experiences and interests coalesce in her writing: “Mum collects mandarin peels and cut lemon skins and places them in the dish after cooking, so that as the oven cools, it gives off a bittersweet, hot-sugar scent. The rinds begin to dry out and curl in the warmth while the dog sleeps at our feet. Not far away, we can hear waves roaring in a southerly gale. Our skin smells of salt and oranges.” (p. 124)
A poet who won the Nan Shepherd prize for nature writing, Nina Mingya Powles writes as beautifully as you’d expect, and wears her thoughtfulness and reading lightly. References to some of Riverside’s favourite books kept popping up. Braiding Sweetgrass, Crying in H Mart, Mixed Race Superman, Wayward Lives and The Living Mountain all feature, and gave me the pleasurable feeling of having a very intelligent friend talking about things I had just read. Her discussion of old family objects and writings as a sort of enduring but complicated archive usefully echoes Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory.
I know I will read this again, and I have already lined up two people to lend it to. It feels like a gift someone has given you, and that you want to share with others.
Michelle Zauner is perhaps best known for her music, produced under the moniker Japanese Breakfast, but this memoir proves that her talent stretches across multiple mediums. Zauner was in her 25th year and a struggling artist when her mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She upended her life and returned to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon to take care of her as her illness became terminal. The memoir is told as a kind of non-linear narrative, moving through Zauner’s reminiscences about her relationship with her mother which was extremely close yet often challenging, a familial relationship knotted with cultural differences (Zauner’s father is white and she was raised in America) and deep love.
Food becomes a touchstone throughout the book, Korean food particularly became a way for Zauner to connect with her mother, Chongmi, and other members of her mother’s family even after their deaths: ‘When I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck: I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.’
The result is a touching and sensual book. I felt Zauner’s profound love for her mother radiating off the page at every turn, but particularly in her depictions of her mother’s small acts of care. When Zauner tells her mother she wants some cowboy boots, Chongmi not only buys her some but carefully wears them in first. I thoroughly recommend Crying in H Mart for fans of creative non-fiction and contemporary food writing.
Our Summer Reading Promotion is now on in store, get 4 books for the price of 3 (with the cheapest book free). We have titles available across Children’s, Fiction and Non-Fiction, see our full list of titles for purchase in the 4 for 3 promotion below:
Fiction Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Troy by Stephen Fry
Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain
I Am An Island by Tamsin Calidas
V For Victory by Lisa Evans
The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
Us Three by Ruth Jones
Actress by Anne Enright
V2 by Robert Harris
All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Summer by Ali Smith
Non-Fiction The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Phillippa Perry
Agent Sonia by Ben Macintyre
Difficult Women by Helen Lewis
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty
The Moth and the Mountain by Ed Caesar
Sicily ’43 by James Holland
Childrens The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charles Mackesy
The Unadoptables by Hana Tooke
Worst Holiday Ever by Charlie Higson
Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure by Jeff Kinney
After a year of intermittent lockdowns, when I was lucky enough to have a lively local park near me and to be able to visit it, I am very ready to try out some new London green spots. London Green Spaces is one of a gorgeous new series of small London guidebooks, and this book makes it fun to start a day-out wishlist. Even looking at the photos cheered me up.
I thought I knew most of the cool parks and green bits in London, but there were several in here I’d never heard of. London Green Spaces offers an enticing reminder of the big places too, the ones that you know about but haven’t visited for a while, like Richmond Park or Epping Forest. Useful cover maps and suggested walks would help make a day of it.
The Red Cross Garden in London Bridge features, and I can vouch for its sanctuary-like feel as a respite from the Borough Market crowds at the weekend (https://www.bost.org.uk/). The book is good on these small places as well as the grand sweeping ones. I’d add the Crossbones Graveyard, just round the corner from the Red Cross Garden, though you always need to check the opening hours (https://crossbones.org.uk/).
Other craveable titles in the series include Vegan London, London Pubs, and Independent London. You’re in London (maybe)… it’s summer (sort of)… if you’re able to get out and about these books will help you lively up your plans.
This is the most instantly useful book I have read this year. The subtitle shows exactly what it is for: “Tools for opening up conversations when it matters most”.
Produced with the Samaritans and drawing on the experiences of their volunteers and service users, whose useful and detailed insights appear throughout the book, this is a straightforward guide to active listening. It is very easy to read and no special skills are needed.
“Have Courage” is very relevant. Often we would like to ask how someone is, but we are worried that we might make things worse or not be able to deal with that person’s distress. Samaritans service user James says: “It’s really not about being a specialist or having particular knowledge. It’s about being a compassionate human being. I wish people had the confidence to realise they are able to offer real help just by listening”.
How to Listen warns against giving advice or relaying your own experiences, suggesting instead that listeners prioritise giving people the space to express and explore their own problems and to come to their own solutions. This has been a revelation for me. It provides useful advice on spotting people who may be in distress and helps you listen to them properly without distractions. One thing to do the next time you’re talking to someone: put your phone away and really pay attention.
I was speaking a couple of years ago with someone who was helping with a citizen science project which was monitoring eels in London rivers. They would empty a trap set for the eels, measure them, and release them. They were told by the research lead that they did not need to take a photo of the eels each time. “There are lots of things we don’t know about eels, but what they look like isn’t one of them”.
The Gospel of the Eels goes after these mysterious animals, explaining that there are large parts of the eels’ lives that remain unknown to science, including exactly where and how they breed. What is clearer is that European eels are in danger of becoming extinct, and that urgently solving some of their puzzles might help protect them even though something might be lost with their mystery. Svensson quotes Rachel Carson: “And as they passed through the surf and out to the sea, so they also passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge”.
Svensson is interesting on eels’ impact on modern life. Sigmund Freud spent time early in his career studying eels, and Svensson makes a good case for this influencing his later theories (‘Sigmund Freud and the eels of Trieste’ is possibly one of my favourite chapter titles ever). He spots eels in literature, including work by Graham Swift and E.T.A. Hoffman.
Among the natural history and current science, Svensson recalls eel fishing with his father as a child. Some of the fishing detail is frankly revolting to a non-fishing person, but the experiences become a place to explore his relationship with his father. Svensson notes that life for working class families like his in Sweden changed hugely during the last half of the twentieth century: “… it had become possible for a road paver and day care worker mum, my parents, to live a life that was different in every way from the lives previous generations of the working class had known”. He finds that attending to eels leads him to pay better mind: this reminded me of some of the arguments made by Julia Bell in Radical Attention (https://peninsulapress.co.uk/product/radical-attention).
The premise of The Gospel of the Eels sounds strange, but it is not strained or annoying. It’s well-translated popular science with memoir, and a pleasure to read. Why gospel though? When science lacks answers, faith can fill the gap. Perhaps if we can fix things for the eels, we can start to fix things for ourselves.
“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present”.
Adichie’s much-loved father died in June 2020, and this tender and anguished short book contains her reflections on her grief. Best known for her modern classic novels, including Half of a Yellow Sun, and essays including We Should All Be Feminists, this is written in her usual fluid style despite the pain it conveys.
The pandemic complicates everything. Family members are on different continents and flights are cancelled. Arrangements have to be made on Zoom, where weeks before routine family chats including her father had been filled with laughter and everyday chat.
It is about loss, but it is also about the deep love she has for her father. Many people have been hit with unexpected and devastating bereavement over the last year. This relatable and timely book might end up being a life raft for some.
This is Your Time is a stunning new book by Ruby Bridges, who as a six-year-old in 1960 was the first black child to attend an all-white primary school in New Orleans.
The book is small in size but huge in meaning. Bridges talks about the hate she faced outside her school gates every day from white adults who wanted to keep segregation. There is a black and white photograph on every other page, including some truly shocking images. A tiny Ruby is escorted into school by four federal marshals; racist protesters hold up a black doll in a coffin; and images of police targeting civil rights demonstrators in 1963 and 2020.
But there are also hope and joy, friendship and solidarity, and great faith in young people. Bridges writes to young readers: “I am so inspired by you and by everyone out there making change happen. I know, and you must remember… what can inspire tomorrow often lies in our past”. She knows this because of her lifetime of work telling young people her story.
Ruby Bridges’ message of courage and friendship is essential for all people. A gift to the future from one whose courage helped shape the best of the present.
A kingfisher sat on a riverside branch, so close that I could see blackblue feathers in the early morning light. I was in a London park, near where I live, last weekend. I was alone, with no special equipment or expertise, but I was paying attention to the river. The kingfisher hunched, and tidied itself up, and after a few minutes flew off when a runner came along.
If you have found yourself noticing nature more during this year, this book of essays by Melissa Harrison is for you. Compiled from her columns in the Times, in the early pieces Harrison is living in South London and gives great descriptions of the nature and wildlife of Tooting Bec Common. Who knew you could see a hobby flying over Lambeth? “There are pockets of South London that seem utterly rural: paths edged with cow parsley and dog roses and overhung by oaks through which the sunlight filters down, green-dappled and shifting” (p. 44).
Half way through the book, Harrison relocates to rural Suffolk, and a different kind of natural life. “There are baby rabbits everywhere right now, and sitting in my oak I watched an alert doe shepherd four kits out from the warren by the path to feed… The evening sun picks them out as they play, gold-edged and painterly: humble but quite lovely in the low, warm light” (p. 174). One of the things I love about The Stubborn Light of Things is that Harrison doesn’t say that it is easier or better to be a nature watcher in one place or the other. Her curious gaze finds things to wonder at in both places, a reminder that we only ever need to start where we are.
As readers of her gripping novels At Hawthorn Time and All Among the Barley will know, she is not afraid of addressing difficult things, and here she references the climate emergency and local campaigns to protect wildlife (for a review of one of her novels, see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2015/05/24/at-hawthorn-time-melissa-harrison/).
After reading this, I found similar ideas in On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz (which I am half way through). Horowitz walks round her Manhattan city block with several different people who are expert at different things, and finds out how little we notice in the normal run of things (one of the people is expert at being a toddler and another is expert at being a dog – see https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/).
Harrison’s popular lockdown podcast encouraged us to pay attention, and this book helps us do just that. Joanna Lisowiec’s exquisite illustrations and gorgeous cover art elevate a good read into a beautiful item.
The book’s subtitle is A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. It is not grandiose or heavy, but rather an entertainingly written with focus sharply on those who have sewn textile art to tell stories.
Some stories were familiar and some completely unknown. Sewing features as part of war, propaganda, survival, protest.
The emotional connections between makers and their work emerge strongly. Particularly moving is the story of the Changi quilt, which Hunter visits at the Red Cross archive with a descendant of one of the makers. She notes that it was made by women prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Singapore during the Second World War, to communicate with their men (who were held separately – see also https://changi.redcross.org.uk/).
Hunter is interesting on her own making, and is a “banner-maker, community textile artist and textile curator”. The book is partly memoir. Her frequent focus on activism in the text is a bonus.
I had not heard of the stories of women in Chile, who used the sewing of arpilleras (embroidery on burlap) to protest against the Pinochet dictatorship. “The arpilleras depicted domestic scenes of loss: a woman standing by herself in the doorway of her home, a family mealtime with one empty place. There were also exterior scenes: a marketplace with no food on its stalls, unemployed youngsters scavenging for cardboard to sell, policemen making an arrest, a tree with pictures of lost relatives instead of leaves all backgrounded by the Andes mountains and a shining sun or bright moon” (p. 155 – see also https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/history-of-quilting-arpilleras-made-by-chilean-women-to-protest-pinochet.html).
Threads of Life will send you off on a bunch of reading jags, and also make you search for images of the works discussed. An illustrated version of the book with colour plates would be wonderful, but in the absence of that get ready to be introduced to the stories behind intriguing sewn art from all over the world.
This is an extraordinary and moving book, finding women’s hidden histories in the archives. Hartman makes the invisible visible, in many cases literally with vivid images that will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished reading. Photos, newspaper clippings, and contemporary documents let you see for yourself the stories of women refusing to live like slaves, and striving for freedom and joy.
Focussing on young black women in America in the early twentieth century, Hartman uses a vast range of archival material, and draws out the words and voices of those women wherever she can. Her approach is creative and hugely engaging, and you can tell it’s going to be something different from the cast of characters listed at the start of the book. Included are “Mabel Hampton: Chorine, lesbian, working-class intellectual, and aspiring concert singer” and “The Chorus: All the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty”. Some of the content is inevitably quite distressing. There is deprivation and glamour, imprisonment and rebellion, servitude and love.
The book’s subtitle is Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, and the lives of the women we encounter reveal the personal cost of social injustice and change. In an interview about writing the book, Hartman said she asked herself: “What is it like to imagine a radically different world, or to try to make a beautiful life in a situation of brutal constraint?” (https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/). It’s not like anything else I’ve ever read. The closest thing I’ve found (and also excellent) for revealing hidden women in the archive is Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes (https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15502.html).
Michelle Alexander, author of the seminal book The New Jim Crow, rightly calls Wayward Lives “… a startling, dazzling act of resurrection”. This is exactly what it is. Stunning.
The Riverside Way 