Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Amanda Foreman

Towards Zero: the gruesome countdown to the American Civil War

Some 100,000 books have been written about the American Civil War since it ended in 1865. That’s hardly surprising, given the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000 – more than the losses from all other wars combined. The effusion of blood created a new nation and a new mythology, anchored on the principles of freedom, equality and democracy. There is not much room in this crowded field for Civil War neophytes. Erik Larson knows what he is about, however, in The Demon of Unrest – but do his critics? The mixed reception this book

Charlotte Hobson

Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia

Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow as a Russian correspondent from 2014. Her memoir’s 30-year period covers an entire cycle in Russian politics – as Anna Akhmatova might have put it, from vegetarian to carnivore. In August 2021, Rainsford was stopped at the Russian border and refused entry as a ‘threat to national security’. A few weeks later, she was expelled

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does ‘artistic swimming’ truly describe the world’s hardest sport?

Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as anything other than one of the toughest sports we’ve been watching in Paris – and wonder why anyone would disagree. That question is one that Valosik addresses in her book, along with making the case for the sheer discipline and power of a synchronised swimmer. Her skill is in doing both without ever sounding plaintive

Scott Bradfield

A marriage of radical minds: the creative partnership of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled

Adam Sisman

The crusading journalist who lectured on Shelley to coal miners

‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well as being an MP, he was Paul’s uncle, Michael Foot. Born in 1937, Paul Foot came from a political family. His grandfather, Isaac, and his eldest uncle, Dingle, were both Liberal MPs; his father, Hugh, was a distinguished diplomat who, as Lord Caradon, would become a foreign office minister; and his uncle Michael became a

Saturday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

James Heale, Lara Prendergast, Patrick Marnham, Laura Gascoigne and Michael Simmons

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale interviews Woody Johnson, the former American Ambassador to the UK, about a possible second Trump term (1:19); Lara Prendergast reflects on the issue of smartphones for children and what lessons we could learn from Keir Starmer’s approach to privacy (6:35); reviewing Patrick Bishop’s book ‘Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory’, Patrick Marnham argues the liberation of Paris was hard won (12:37); Laura Gascoigne examines Ukraine’s avant garde movement in light of the Russian invasion (20:34); and, Michael Simmons provides his notes on venn diagrams (28:33).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.  

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

David Baddiel: My Family

41 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and comedian David Baddiel, talking about his new book My Family: the Memoir. He talks about childhood trauma, what made him a comedian, and how describing in minute detail his mother’s decades long affair with a slightly crooked golfing memorabilia salesman is an act not of betrayal but of loving recuperation.

Tuesday

Patrick Marnham

How the myth of Paris liberating itself was born

The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks of the French 2nd armoured division (the famous Deuxième Division Blindée – 2eDB) to lead a diversion into the city, backed by American infantry. De Gaulle claimed that he was concerned to avoid the danger of a bloody insurrection led by the communist Resistance. His real concern was less about bloodshed than his future political

Nikhil Krishnan

Malice and intrigue in the shadow of Tom Tower

‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not (in the usual Oxford way) as Fellows but as Students. That fact may be thought as good an illustration of its eccentricity as of its charm. This book isn’t a history of the House, as such, but a more concentrated series of biographical essays about ‘a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern

Joanna Pocock

Portrait of the artist and mother

On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written to coincide with a touring exhibition of the same name, this ambitious book is more of a survey – a highly illustrated, annotated and well-researched one – than a traditional narrative. Judah’s energetic text displays the hunger of someone after a fast who can’t decide where to start at the buffet. This ravenousness goes somewhere

Matthew Mason

A miracle beckons: Phantom Limb, by Chris Kohler, reviewed

In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not been quite so blessed. After suffering a knee injury in his twenties that derailed a promising athletics career in England, Gillis gave his life to the cloth. His decision to become a minister, however, came not from any love of God (in fact, Gillis isn’t even a believer), but because it promised to provide a

Michael Arditti

After the Flood: There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, reviewed

A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a mudlark, born on the banks of the Thames. After another 174 years that same droplet is found in a bottle in south-eastern Turkey to be used in the baptism of Narin, a nine-year-old Yazidi girl. In Yazidi Creation and Flood myths, humanity descends from Adam alone and the serpent is a saviour Water is both

Orlando Bird

Love it or loathe it – the umami flavour of anchovy

We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies. How times change. Today the average Spaniard puts away 2.69 kilos of the things each year, but it was a different story in the 16th century, when the Catalan chef Ruperto de Nola complained that anchovies were ‘commonly bitter’. A little later, the English physician Tobias Venner fumed that they ‘do nourish nothing at all, but a naughty cholerick blood’.

Emily Rhodes

A haunting theme: The Echoes, by Evie Wyld, reviewed

Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London flat where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident – poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humour (Max notes his ‘strong urge to file a complaint’ about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events. As the book progresses, Wyld alternates sections from Max’s perspective, entitled ‘After’, with others: ‘Before’, Hannah’s perspective on

Madeleine Feeny

Absinthe and the casual fling: Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott, reviewed

‘Ex-wives like us illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men,’ quips Patricia, the flapper heroine of the American novelist Ursula Parrott’s 1929 bestseller, which, republished nearly a century later, reveals striking contemporary resonances. Both timeless and unmistakably of its time, this candid portrait of marital breakdown, and the life of a girl about town in Jazz Age New York, took the US by storm at a moment when dawning sexual liberties jostled with lingering Victorian values. Parrott married in 1923, before birth control was legal, and had a son in secret, against her husband’s wishes. She left him with her family, until

Mark Cocker

The sad history of the Hawaiian crow

Over a 40-year career, Sophie Osborn has evolved from a greenhorn volunteer for nature, doing mundane tasks in the wilds of Wyoming, to the manager of a captive-release programme for California condors in Arizona. This post placed her at the heart of perhaps the most sophisticated operation for a threatened bird anywhere in the world. Yet Osborn was as passionate in her first role as in her later one. She describes her professional arc in Feather Trails, using three bird species as separate motifs to order her story as a play in three acts. The structure not only offers a way of organising an autobiography; it supplies a sequence of

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The rootlessness that haunts the children of immigrants

As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and hints of what seemed like a painful family history – one the adults were keen to brush over. But, like many second-generation immigrants, Wong gravitated towards his father’s homeland in a bid to better understand the man. His parents’ silence only compounded the enigma. Wong attended Xi’s military parades in central Beijing, just as his

Suzi Feay

Small mercies: Dead-End Memories, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed

Tasty meals and epiphanies: that’s what Banana Yoshimoto mostly deals in. It’s no accident that her most famous book is entitled Kitchen. Sometimes the epiphanies come by way of the tasty meals; at other times they are triggered by effects of light playing over rivers, trees, landscapes, as if we had suddenly found ourselves inside a print by Hiroshige. And loneliness. She’s the supreme poet of solitude, and how it can grip even in the middle of one of the world’s busiest cities; even alongside a loving partner. And sudden death. But that’s making Yoshimoto’s graceful work sound far too depressing. There are always the epiphanies, and cake, and chicken

Saturday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson, Paola Romero, Stuart Jeffries, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, and Nicholas Farrell

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Damian Thompson argues that Papal succession plotting is a case of life mirroring art (1:26); Paola Romero reports on Venezuela’s mix of Evita and Thatcher, Maria Corina Machado, and her chances of bringing down Nicolas Maduro (11:39); reviewing Richard Overy’s book ‘Why war?’, Stuart Jeffries reflects that war has as long a future as it has a past (17:38); Ysenda Maxtone Graham provides her notes on party bags (24:30); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders on the challenges of familial split-loyalties when watching the football in Italy (27:25).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Neil Jordan: Amnesiac

47 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club is the writer and film director Neil Jordan, who joins the podcast to discuss his new book Amnesiac: A Memoir. He talks, among other things, about writing for the page and the screen, the uses of myth, putting words into the mouths of historical figures, seeing ghosts in aeroplanes, being ripped off by Harvey Weinstein, and failing to persuade Marlon Brando to play King Lear.