Books

Fang Fang’s Wuhan diaries are a personal account of shared memory

Meng XiaPhD candidate on Literature, memory and trauma, UNSW Starting on January 25 2020, novelist and poet Fang Fang has posted 60 daily diary entries about life and death in her home town of Wuhan to WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform. Born in 1955, Fang has a long and respected career as a writer of poems, novels and novellas. She won the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010, and was elected president of the government-funded Writers Association of Hubei Province in 2007. But her work has rarely been translated into English. Her diaries were read widely in China, and but their reception was mixed. Some readers celebrated Fang for voicing people’s struggles in lockdown, others criticised her viewpoints. In her diary, Fang wrote* about her persistence: “I’m never too old to lose the strength of criticising.” News of publication of her translated diaries in English and German only the inflamed debate in China. But in any language, Fang Fang’s unfolding recording of the pandemic will be valuable for the globe’s understanding of our shared memories of this time. Fang Fang and her dairies Before becoming a writer, Fang worked as a dockworker at the Port of Wuhan, on the Yangtze and Hanjiang rivers. Her stories mostly depict struggling social underdogs in Wuhan. Fang’s diaries (which I read in the original Mandarin) chronicle the situation in Wuhan throughout the lockdown. She describes her daily life in quarantine: food shopping, online communication with families and friends, and responding to readers. She touches on sensitive topics: the investigation of China’s belated reporting on coronavirus, overcrowded hospitals, and those dying at home unattended. There are heartbreaking snapshots: scattered, unclaimed cell phones at a mortuary; sweet moments when volunteers help with the old and the weak. She reflects on the dilemma of media workers in a […]

The World: A Brief Introduction

An invaluable primer from Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, that will help anyone, expert and non-expert alike, navigate a time in which many of our biggest challenges come from the world beyond our borders. Like it or not, we live in a global era, in which what happens thousands of miles away has the ability to affect our lives. This time, it is a Coronavirus known as Covid-19, which originated in a Chinese city many had never heard of but has spread to the corners of the earth. Next time it could well be another infectious disease from somewhere else. Twenty years ago it was a group of terrorists trained in Afghanistan and armed with box-cutters who commandeered four airplanes and flew them into buildings (and in one case a field) and claimed nearly three thousand lives. Next time it could be terrorists who use a truck bomb or gain access to a weapon of mass destruction. In 2016 hackers in a nondescript office building in Russia traveled virtually in cyberspace to manipulate America’s elections. Now they have burrowed into our political life. In recent years, severe hurricanes and large fires linked to climate change have ravaged parts of the earth; in the future we can anticipate even more serious natural disasters. In 2008, it was a global financial crisis caused by mortgage-backed securities in America, but one day it could well be a financial contagion originating in Europe, Asia, or Africa. This is the new normal of the 21st century. The World is designed to provide readers of any age and experience with the essential background and building blocks they need to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world. It will empower them to manage the flood of daily news. Readers will become more […]

The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

She said

Rumors had swirled around Harvey Weinstein for decades, and the New York Times’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were not the only reporters to put their noses to this ugly trail. But as they spoke to actresses and, in a surprising turn, more and more female former employees of the Weinstein Company, they discovered that settlements and nondisclosure agreements had smothered the truth. The steps taken by others to conceal Weinstein’s actions and give them legal cover are almost as chilling as Weinstein’s abuse, and Kantor and Twohey’s unwinding of this camouflage is a delicate maneuver made possible only by women willing to break their silence. The reporters’ urging of an actress to go on the record about Weinstein’s abuse and a last-minute face off with Weinstein and his lawyers in the Times’s offices brings the investigation to its pinnacle of tension. As the book switches to another high-profile accusation, the pacing grows clunky, likely because the authors were not embedded in that investigation, but then rises again, buoyed by a small gathering of very different women at Gwyneth Paltrow’s house. Their candid talk on the lingering toxicity of abuse, social media backlash, and the damage to these women’s careers caused by both silence and speaking out will bring home to readers how one abusive moment can ruin lives, and how listening to what “she said” is the first and important step to stopping someone from perpetrating crime after crime.

When You Kant Figure It Out, Ask a Philosopher

Timeless Wisdom for Modern Dilemmas by Marie Robert Advice for modern dilemmas from the greatest Western philosophers. How can Kant comfort you when you get ditched via text message? How can Aristotle cure your hangover? How can Heidegger make you feel better when your dog dies? When You Kant Figure It Out, Ask a Philosopher explains how pearls of wisdom from the greatest Western philosophers can help us face and make light of some of the daily challenges of modern life. In twelve clever, accessible chapters, you’ll get advice from Epicurus about how to disconnect from constant news alerts and social media updates, Nietzsche’s take on getting in shape, John Stuart Mill’s tips for handling bad birthday presents, and many other classic insights to help you navigate life today. Hilarious, practical, and edifying, When You Kant Figure It Out, Ask a Philosopher brings the best thinkers of the past into the 21st Century to help us all make sense of a chaotic new world.

Did Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings because he was avoiding his academic work?

By John M. Bowers Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf. Much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s success as a ﬁction writer derives from assimilating several of these fantasies of the past including the decadent Middle Ages described by Faramir at Minas Tirith. Strangely missing from Eco’s literary types was the jolly, earthy, boisterous Middle Ages of the Decameron in his Italian tradition and the Canterbury Tales in ours. This Chaucerian legacy, so clearly embodied in Tolkien’s hobbits, is easy enough to miss because it has been so thoroughly normalized in English literature that it no longer seems “medieval” at all, especially in Oxford where Chaucer had been a steady literary presence for more than ﬁve centuries. Some listeners inside Merton Hall in 1959 might nonetheless have been surprised that Tolkien, best known for his work on Old English poetry, devoted a section of his “Valedictory Address” to recruiting Chaucer to the cause of Language against Literature in a debate still very much alive in the retiring professor’s mind: His merits as a major poet are too obvious to be obscured; though it was in fact Language, or Philology, that demonstrated, as only Language could, two things of ﬁrst-rate literary importance: that he was not a fumbling beginner, but a master of metrical technique; and that he was an inheritor, a middle point, and not a ‘father’. Not to mention the labours of Language in rescuing much of his vocabulary and idiom from ignorance or misunderstanding. Repeating views about Chaucer from his letter to John Maseﬁeld in 1938, this encomium would have sounded surprising only because nobody knew about Tolkien’s efforts at rescuing 14th-century vocabulary and idiom during his own long labors on Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose.HTMLPreview Like almost all medievalists […]

Dog Walks Man

John Zeaman Imagine if Annie Dillard had taken a dog along with her to Tinker Creek. Now imagine Tinker Creek was a New Jersey suburb, and you have an idea of the surprises that await in John Zeaman’s book. Humorous, thought-provoking, and playful, Dog Walks Man might also be called Zen and the Art of Dog Walking. Zeaman takes us on a journey from a ’round-the-block fraternity of “dog-walking dupes”—suburban fathers who indulged their children’s wish for a dog—to a strange and forbidden wonderland at the edge of town: the New Jersey Meadowlands. Along the way he rediscovers childhood’s forgotten “fringe places,” investigates the mysteries of the natural world, and experiences moments of inexplicable joy. Each chapter of Dog Walks Man is a bite-size meditation on the wisdom derived from dogs and dog walking. Woven into the narrative are musings on such familiar dog-walking issues as the war of nerves that precedes each walk (or “w-a-l-k” if your dog is in earshot), the problem of dog-walking monotony, and why dog walkers are always the ones to discover dead bodies. This is also the story of Pete, the prescient standard poodle who begins as the “family glue” and evolves into Zeaman’s partner on a journey through an abandoned landscape as alive as any jungle. Above all, Dog Walks Man is about a search for wholeness in an increasingly artificial world. It is about discovering what Thoreau meant when he wrote, in his seminal essay “Walking,” “Life consists with wildness.” Because the truth is, something as simple as walking the dog can open up unexpected worlds. An excerpt In the beginning, I walked around the block. Or a couple of blocks. It didn’t seem to matter. That it didn’t matter was in itself novel. It had been a long time since I had gone out without any particular destination or […]

Talking-to-Strangers-PIC-The-Mirror-website

Talking to Strangers : What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

This is the highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, No.1 international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger’s motives? Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings – from history, psychology and infamous legal cases – Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences. No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

Jill Abramson on the growing pains of digital whizzkids

Jill Abramson’s book, Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution is mostly a story of four news organisations during these past two decades of media upheaval, says Philip Delves Broughton. The news business has been caught in an endless whirlwind ever since the arrival of the internet. Newspapers have seen their traditional business models collapse and only a few have figured out ways to survive, let alone thrive. All that juicy advertising money which once sent correspondents overseas and covered bar tabs around the world has long since been sucked up by the remorseless machines of Silicon Valley. Jill Abramson stood briefly at the centre of this chaos. As editor of The New York Times from 2011 to 2014, the first woman to hold the position, her tenure ended in a managerial dust-up involving the Times’ digital strategy. She was scuppered, she alleges, by the duplicity of Mark Thompson, former director-general of the BBC , who had been appointed chief executive. “Smart as an Oxford don and proud of it,” she writes of her loathed British overlord. “With a shadow of facial stubble and reddish hair, his casual dress concealed a command-and-control ferocity.” His English accent, she says, intimidated the paper’s owners. Despite this flash of professional score-settling, though, Abramson’s book is mostly a story of four news organisations during these past two decades of media upheaval, two old, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and two new, Vice and BuzzFeed. The travails of newspapers are well known, and Abramson does a thorough job of describing the contortions at The Times and The Post. Not so long ago senior editors would leave meetings if business issues were raised. It would have been unthinkable to have technologists sitting on the newsroom floor monitoring web traffic. Yet, here we are, with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owning […]

If you can read this headline, you can read a novel.

Judith SeaboyerSenior Lecturer, The University of Queensland Public anxiety about the capacity of digital-age children and young adults to read anything longer than a screen grab has come to feel like moral panic. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest we must take such unease seriously. In 2016, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported the proportion of American adults who read at least one novel in 2015 had dropped to 43.1% from 56.9% in 1982. In 2018, a US academic reported that in 1980, 60% of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, the number had plummeted to 16%. Those same 12th graders reported spending “six hours a day texting, on social media and online”. American literacy expert and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes the threat screen reading poses to our capacity for “the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading”. She asks: Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? But rather than taking up defensive positions on either side of the digital-analogue reading divide, Wolf encourages us to embrace both. As parents and teachers we can help our children develop a bi-literate reading brain. There are several ways we can do this. Reading pathways Reading is a learned skill that requires the development of particular neural networks. And different reading platforms encourage the development of different aspects of those networks. Screen-reading children, immersed from toddlerhood in the pleasures and instant gratification of skimming, clicking and linking, develop cognitive skills that make them adept power browsers, good at the useful ability to scan […]

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