Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way by Michael Bond (Picador, 2020) We are wanderers. Twentieth Century GPS worshippers with hunter-gatherer brains. Neuroscience has identified specialised brain regions adapted for specific navigation skills. There are boundary cells, grid cells, head direction cells. How they are coordinated is the focus… Continue reading Lost & Found
Tag: Books
So what do you know?
Or rather, what can we know? Donald Rumsfeld is wrongly mocked for a “misunderstimated” quote when he served under President George Dubbya Bush. There may have been many things in his political career for which he deserved ridicule, but not for this: as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we… Continue reading So what do you know?
Thinking Differently
Thoughts in Mental Health Awareness Week 9-15 May 2022 Fear of the unknown When I was in my teens I was afraid. Unnerved by what and who I did not know, and unsettled by media’s reflex association between mental illness and violence (which still persists in the lazy tabloids). In my ignorance these feelings were… Continue reading Thinking Differently
At the Crossroads…
Crossroads: In search of moments that changed music by Mark Radcliffe (2019 Cannongate Books) The Crossroads: where Robert Johnson bargained his soul for the Devil’s music; where Tony Iommi guillotined his fingers and was inspired by the gypsy jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt; where Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend’s deodorant inspire the grunge anthem of the 1990s.… Continue reading At the Crossroads…
Outside, looking in
The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered By Peter Davidson (Bodleian Library Publishing; 2021) The homeward traveller sees a distant light in the gathering gloom; a stranger looks up to the bright unshuttered window; in a distant tower, the light from a sputtering candle betrays the scholar late at his books. That figure on the road,… Continue reading Outside, looking in
King Alfred to Alien
Via Jude the Obscure and Hovis No-one knows exactly when, but around the year 888, Alfred the great king of the Anglo-Saxons founded an abbey and set up his daughter Æthelgifu there as Abbess. It became in time a powerful institution, home to several memorable and influential English women. And at one stage it was… Continue reading King Alfred to Alien
“Consider the birds of the air…”
12 Birds to Save Your Life: nature’s lessons in happiness by Charlie Corbett (Michael Joseph, 2021) This is a book to make you stop, watch, listen and allow encounters with the natural world to calm you, teach you, heal you, delight you. Charlie Corbett tells the personal and at times painful story of family tragedy,… Continue reading “Consider the birds of the air…”
We are here because you were there.
Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Penguin 2021) Sanghera is a British Sikh writer whose parents emigrated to Britain from the Punjab. Or to put it another way, the author is as British as anyone else. Yet the experience of living in multicultural Britain is – for those whose families were from… Continue reading We are here because you were there.
Fabulous Creations – Vanishing Worlds
Roger Lytollis, “PANIC AS MAN BURNS CRUMPETS”: The Vanishing World of the Local Journalist (Robinson 2021) David Hepworth, A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives (Penguin, Random House 2019) I can remember the frisson of walking home from the record shop with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon under one arm. There… Continue reading Fabulous Creations – Vanishing Worlds
Morsels of the Night Sky
Book Review: A History of the Universe in 100 Stars by Florian Freistetter (Quercus 2021 – English translation from the 2019 original German edition) This title is surely a winner, and indeed this book is acclaimed an International Bestseller. What could be better than a comprehensible history of the universe, told in bite-sized chapters each… Continue reading Morsels of the Night Sky