Three-dimensional problem

One-Dimensional Woman

By Nina Power

Nina Power isn’t one to mince her words. In this provocative polemic, she’s assertive, combative and as sharp as a scalpel. Power’s slim book can be classed as an analysis of where feminism stands today. And it isn’t pretty. She is drawn again and again into how capitalism’s gains are equality’s losses.

A beautiful journey

My Beautiful Genome

By Lone Frank

Although scientists have been studying genes for decades, the consumer genomics industry is only just finding its feet. A rash of companies have rushed into the market over recent years. They offer all sorts of genome services, from tracing your ancestors through to your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s and even genetic-match dating.

Tying up the loose ends

The Elegant Universe

By Brian Greene

Although this book is for someone with more than just a casual interest in the nature of the universe, it is nevertheless an excellent account of the most challenging big idea of our time – String Theory. Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe proved very popular when it was first published a decade ago, and it is not hard to see why. His approach to String Theory is one of absolute wonder and, at the same time, the cool objectivity a decent teachers needs in order to explain it to his pupils.

Greene strikes this balance with perfection. His examples are tangible and understandable, his descriptions reasonable. And he weaves together some of the biggest ideas in physics beautifully: in Greene’s hands, you can hear the universe clicking together. No longer are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s space-time and Feynman’s quanta locked in their contradictory silos. Greene shows how String Theory unites them. Tantalisingly, he even hints at discoveries expected but yet to happen as of the time of writing. It’s now up to me to find out what’s happened in String Theory over the last decade. Now that the Large Hadron Collider is warming up properly, what a great time!

So real you can smell the blood

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is an extraordinary book. Friends of literature know its claim to fame – journalism with a novelist’s approach – but the experience of reading it is much more profound than a simple tagline. In bringing together the two worlds of reportage and fiction, Capote is clearly a talented interviewer, researcher and writer. Most of us are blessed if we can succeed in just one of those roles.

The book tells the story of how two young men robbed and murdered a family in a small American town in 1959. In my opinion, Capote’s account is so compelling for focusing on two areas: the shockwaves sent through the community by this awful event, and the psychological profiles of the two killers. Let’s take the first focus. The voices of the community are one of the most memorable aspects of this book, whether it’s the hard line taken by the postmistress or the devastation of the victims’ friends. You can hear these characters as real people. Indeed they are so well drawn that you hit a paradox: they are as well characterised as a novel’s protagonists, which the writer has invented and spent time bending to his will – and yet these are flesh-and-blood people who did indeed live through the nightmare that struck this small community. Capote, then, has a talent for conducting a great interview and then capturing it within his text.

Now let’s turn to his portrayal of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote’s masterstroke is his decision not to reveal their motive early on. By doing so, he creates tension and chills. The killers are characterised so perfectly that you feel what they feel, even to the extent of being able to understand how they could come to commit such an awful crime. Capote delves into their respective histories and uses them to craft a chilling portrayal of the pair of them. Their statements – reproduced at length towards the end of the book – are compelling. It’s like reading a detective’s files. In fact, it’s better: it’s like interviewing murder suspects yourself and hearing their ghastly admissions.

One criticism of the book is that Capote fails to convey the killers’ long wait to execution. His attempt includes telling the stories of a few other death-row inmates, but this detracts from the tight story he has told until that point. I can understand why he might want to stretch out the close, as it happened in real life, but he doesn’t quite achieve what I suspect he wanted to. But that is a minor blot on an exquisite canvas. I suspect that In Cold Blood will remain an important book for some time.

She’s right, but I wouldn’t have guessed it

Fat is a Feminist Issue
By Susie Orbach

Although I’ve never intentionally hurt or offended a person for being overweight, I have judged them. My knowledge of why people are overweight extended only to diet and activity level. Through this book, Orbach has told me that those two reasons are the tip of a very large iceberg. The third, much more significant reason for obesity is psychology – psychology influenced by the culture and society in which the victim has lived. Because women are in many ways handcuffed by culture and society, Orbach shows, their weight problems are a feminist issue.

After having read the book, that seems so much like common sense to me. Beforehand, I knew that our culture expected women to look and behave a certain way. And I probably would have concluded that this could lead to weight problems. But I figured that, ultimately, every person knows what constitutes a sensible, ordered diet and an appropriate level of physical activity – and that if they did not adhere to these principles then they were to blame if they found themselves overweight. How awful I now realise that position to be. It is not just judgmental; it is ignorant.

So thanks to Orbach for making in roads into my ignorance with this fine book. She manages to write both a feminist polemic and a self-help book on the same pages. When you think about how many authors struggle to do just one of those things effectively, you begin to realise the extent of her achievement. One strategy Orbach employs here is to bring in the experiences of members of the various groups she has run: she re-tells the stories of women with eating disorders, opening my eyes to the great spectrum of experiences of these victims, and provides her own psychological analysis at the same time. It’s a very competent way of revealing the problem while simultaneously ensuring that her reader understands it.

There are a few problems with Orbach’s grammar – she doesn’t seem to use enough commas – and some of the analysis is looking very dated (it was originally published in 1978). That said, we still clearly have a weight problem in the world. I believe Orbach’s book to be effective, because it has given me an insight into this problem. But what of all the victims still out there?

Astonishingly alive

The Diversity of Life

By Edward O. Wilson

This book is something of a revelation to me. I have read only a few books about the natural world – most of them being older or much older than myself – and have wondered whether it is possible to write such a book in an almost literary style. You know the kind I mean: beautiful descriptions of nature that feel more at home in a novel than a field guide to mushroom picking.

And Wilson’s cracked it. The opening ‘scene’ is breathtaking. All he does is describe a night he spent in the rainforest in the middle of a storm. But the words he employs, the fluid sentence structure that strings them together and the heart-and-mind insight he provides elevates it above almost any other such account I’ve read, in fiction or otherwise. Of course, Wilson’s a man of science too. This book is not a slur of anecdotes about camping in the bush. Wilson takes his reader on a journey through the natural world in a way that Darwin never could have. Writing a century and a half after Darwin, Wilson is much more comfortable plotting the origins of species and, more importantly for this book, their place in the contemporary world. That is not to say urban environments, but the entire biosphere. Wilson breaks down every layer of every biome and shows us just how much life is there. Only a million or so species have been identified and studied, he says, but between 10 million and 100 million probably exist. The sections I found particularly insightful are those in which the author describes the interconnectedness between every life form in an ecosystem: the ‘weeds and bugs’ living in every one of the five or so strata of a forest floor are especially memorable.

I would suspect that, for many readers, the most memorable part of this book is actually the final third, in which Wilson enters polemical mode. After having outlined the great diversity of life and why it is important for our planet, he sets forth his manifesto for a reversal of environmental destruction and real custodianship of our natural world. It is both enlightening and persuasive. Twenty years after this book was published, I can’t help but feel that it has fallen on the scrapheap. Aren’t we still cutting down rainforests? Aren’t we still extinguishing species because we desire their meat, bones or skin – or just because we want to live where they live? And yet Wilson has some very practical ideas and some compelling arguments. Perhaps it’s time that this book came back into the public consciousness. However, I feel that its greatest flaw is that it is only one-third polemical. The rest would be characterised by some as boring science or – worse – a birdwatcher’s field notes. Wilson and others know how important the preservation of biodiversity is. The question is: how do you make all 7 billion of us care?

Sexism is alive and well

Living Dolls: the return of sexism

By Natasha Walter

For as long as I can remember, I have been alive to the fact that, in Western society’s eyes, people are not created equal. I wasn’t around during even the second-wave of feminism, but I knew that people were still discriminated against due to their sex or gender. So I came to Walter not for affirmation, but examples, analysis and explanation.

At first I felt that she was providing only examples. A great deal of this book – especially in the first half – is exposition. For instance, Walter describing a typical night in an Essex nightclub in which the girls are invited on stage to pose for Nuts magazine; Walter interviewing former strippers; Walter describing the girls’ pink and glittery section of the toy shop. Walter described all these encounters – many of which shocked me – in neat and concise prose. Her writing is cast by Walter’s scepticism: naturally, she cannot describe a girl’s wanting to be a pink princess without a dose of cynicism in her language. While some of these accounts were gripping, they were not what I came for. I wanted insight. I craved objective analysis – especially after Walter had opened my eyes further.

Eventually it came, and it was worth the wait. I still can’t help but imagine what this polemic would have been like if Walter analysed every encounter she had while describing it to us or, in any case, if her analysis came closer to a description of something problematic. But her decision to keep the exposition and analysis mostly separate is nevertheless an intriguing one. I suppose in the very least it left me really hungry for the analysis when it did come.

And I have to say that I found her arguments compelling, persuasive and well made. I had found the ‘pink princess’ approach to girls’ toys rather tasteless, but I always thought that that had been down to the fact that I’m a boy or a grown-up or a bigger fan of other colours – or a republican. But now I feel I have some substantive reasons for not liking it. Walter puts the ‘pink princess’ phenomenon in context, plots its development relative to other narrow representations of women and shows what it does for the developing psychology of a young girl. The realisation that, in the extreme, a modern girl is essentially building her identity through medieval values (entitlement, privilege, dependence, and the wait for a prince to take over the role of provision from her father) is shocking. My second surprise is Walter’s explanation of how the media’s sexualisation of women affects us all. She breaks down the notion that now women who choose to strip or pose in a lads’ mag are empowered.

I think she could have developed this argument more, but nevertheless her examples speak for themselves. The women she meets, who chose to strip, describe how it is not empowering at all. And the girls she interviews, perhaps most crushing of all, explain how they want to be glamour models. Walter craftily weaves example and analysis together here when she positions these girls against her argument that sexualised representations of women in the media present very narrow choices for young girls. Girls who see glamour models all the time think that the models’ bodies are the ‘ideal’ body types: they work towards achieving this or become depressed that they don’t have it. And Walter drives home her point with statements from her interviewees (one very compelling 17-year-old included) who feel that that is exactly what these representations do: present very persuasive but narrow choices.

The great thing about Walter and this book, by the way, is that she doesn’t suggest for one moment that internet porn turns all men into dangerous sex obsessives or all women into subservient performers; her arguments are much more nuanced. To that extent, I could have done with a broader analysis. That is, the affect of sexism’s return on men. Walter mentions men superficially, but more insight would have been welcome. Perhaps that is another book, though; Living Dolls remains concise, tight and expertly argued.

An intellectual adventure

African Exodus

By Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie

Readers willing to look beyond the rather academic paperback style of publication will find in this book a great deal to contemplate that is not beyond their layperson’s understanding. The publisher’s choice of book size, cover illustration and paper type may deter some general readers, but the content of Stringer’s argument is comprehensible to anyone familiar with anthropology as a non-specialist.

As one of the main proponents of the Out of Africa theory of human origins, Stringer is well placed to make this argument. Indeed, one of the book’s chapters is a diary-like account of Stringer’s own journey around Europe as a young man to examine fossilised skulls held by museums. He’s hardly Indiana Jones, but African Exodus reads in part like an adventure – albeit intellectual – at times. Stringer repositions the opposing multiregional theory of our origins (the rise of Homo sapiens simultaneously in different parts of the world) and gradually unfolds the Out of Africa theory with such superior logic that the former idea is left in the wilderness.

The layperson may find it difficult to keep up with the various species and genera discussed in this book, and a general ‘best current thinking’ diagram at the beginning would not have gone amiss, but for the most part, McKie’s clear and concise prose keeps the interest up. Perhaps what I shall remember most of the book are the amazing facts it contains: for example, that there is greater genetic diversity between different people in Africa than there are between an African and, say, a European. Astonishing knowledge – this book’s full of it.

Brilliant from the beginning (whenever that was)

The Origin of Humankind

By Richard Leakey

You would be forgiven for raising an eyebrow to the idea that a book with this scope contains no more than 160 pages (not counting the index and preface). And yet Leakey manages to pull that eyebrow back down – all the while explaining how you came to have a brow in the first place.

The Origin of Humankind is a story of eons. Its first few chapters discuss our rather sloppy view of ancient humans. This covers our interpretations of the oldest hominid fossils. But you can find that elsewhere. Leakey includes a unique running commentary as to how the squabbles between anthropologists and archaeologists mean that we’ve done more inferring than proving when it comes to ancient man. Leakey occasionally takes his own view, but has written this book in such a way that it introduces its reader to countless theories and explains how they interpret the scattered facts we’ve collected, and that’s it. This is a useful tactic: it keeps the book short and does not get too bogged down in detail – perfect for the layman. In that sense, Leakey’s wisdom shines through not what is included here, but what is omitted.

Furthermore, the book’s title is cleverer than at first glance. Although it may seem like a rather generic and obvious title for a book about, well, the origin of humankind, you would be wrong to think that it centres on the moments Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. Equally, this is not a book that is only a description of the fossil record. The ‘humankind’ of Leakey’s title is a much broader concept. So much so that he questions from the opening paragraphs onwards what we mean when we talk of ‘humans’. This question underpins every more scientific observation described here: Leakey points out that there remains a lack of consensus on for just how long the Homo line was connected to the Australopithecine line. Any question to this conundrum has an implication on the greater wonderment of when we became ‘human’. Leakey takes this question further, by expanding into the development of art, language and ultimately, the mind.

He shows, therefore, that the origin of humankind was not a spark, but a gradual flowering. It is an exhilarating journey in such a short read.

Eye-opening at the tiniest scale

The Selfish Gene

By Richard Dawkins

Sometimes it’s just good fun to read a book by a writer with such a distinctive and strident voice that it appears to drown out all opponents. As a scientist, Dawkins is probably sensible enough to listen to others in his field. But the great joy of this book is the singular vision he offers. Dawkins pushes through the crowd of a generation of scientists in order to clamber up to the soapbox and scream his thrilling theory. His view of the gene as a competitive, political molecule worthy of Ancient Rome is enticingly reflected in his own audacious approach. While Darwin dithered, Dawkins dives in.

And then there is the theory itself. Pick your superlative: influential, controversial, profound. History has shown that it is all these things and more. To the layman, the concept behind The Selfish Gene is exciting. To the scientist, it must have been downright shocking. Dawkins’ central thesis rests on the very plausible assumption that until his book, science has viewed genes upside down. He argues that because we have studied bodies for centuries, upon the discovery of genes, we formulated theories about how genes code for different aspects of our biology and why. The selfish gene theory posits that bodies are merely survival machines produced by the genes themselves in order for them to continue replicating. It’s a huge idea of the kind that does not come around very often.

And Dawkins is the writer to do it justice. His prose is clear, crisp and not technical in the slightest. He uses brilliant examples that open the reader’s eyes to the natural world. Above all else, his rhetoric is deeply attractive.