Capital by Thomas Piketty

I read this for my newly formed non fiction discussion group. Or at least I read the first half of it! The theme of the book is that inherited wealth is the foundation of inequality. It’s a Marxist viewpoint. So, when a person inherits wealth, then they can invest those additional assets into further wealth producing assets. And thus wealth inequality not only continues but increases. It’s not a new story. His solution is taxation, specifically death taxes I think, but as I said I didn’t get to the end. Friends who know these things are quite critical of the book and his theories, but I am not well enough educated in the area of economics to do much more than observe the arguments. The group stopped halfway through because we all felt overwhelmed by the content, including all the formulae etc, but then we are all from a humanities background and chose this book to challenge ourselves. It sure did!

The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto

I heard Fatima Bhutto speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival this year, about both the problems that beset Pakistan and specifically about this book. She attempts to open people’s eyes to the phenomenon of young people leaving their homes to fight with militant Islamist groups through the medium of fiction. The book deals with three young people who leave their homes running from problematic lives, where they feel they have no place. You get both the back story and the story of their journey, in all its horrifying detail as they become ever more deeply embroiled in their situation. I didn’t enjoy this book particularly. I found it a very depressing read, not surprising when the real life situation is exactly that.

No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

This is a very hard book to read. It’s hard because of the story it tells, the flight of this brilliant Kurdish journalist, thinker and poet from persecution in his homeland and his incarceration by Australian authorities on Manus Island. Where he still is. It’s hard because he wrote his story as texts on his phone and sent it out via WhatApp. So what he talks about is the unremitting banality and boredom of daily life, interspersed with the horror of the third world conditions of mundane things like food queues and toilet filth, and then the flashes of hideous violence, torture and death of the inmates. Yet the language is beautiful, just beautiful. He escapes, in a sense, into philosophical musings. And there is something about Farsi that translates as poetry, probably the structure of the original language itself, which the translator has allowed to retain itself. This is a book that makes you angry, that you don’t want to read because it is true and it is wrong, but that you must read.

The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China, by John Man

Everybody has heard of Genghis Khan, and anyone familiar with Coleridge will recall his grandson Kublai Khan: ‘in Xanadu di Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’. And by the by, Kublai also conquered and united tribes like the Jin and the Song to create what we know as modern day China. John Man’s book about the Mongols who built an empire greater than the Romans, yet lasted only about 150 years before their line failed, is conversational and readable. I got more than a bit lost with the names of all the khans and their generals, their powerful and politically manipulative wives and the groups they led and those they conquered. However, the big picture emerges of a fierce and driven warrior group, who relentlessly invaded, murdered and pillaged all that lay before them. Man’s book looks too at the legacy of the Mongols, not so much anything cultural, because apart from their belief in a god called Blue Heaven in a sort of shamanistic religion, they did not impose any cultural values on the states they conquered. They were nomads, herders and warriors, not poets and musicians. Their legacy, rather, was how the world developed as a result of their empire building, to begin with their presence in the genetic makeup of 16 million men today, probably, Man says, because of their constant movement and the habit of giving beautiful women to the generals as booty. Second, Man believes the Mongols may have played a critical role in spreading the Black Death along what he describes as their ‘pony-express’ travel routes and because of their tactic of hurling plague infested bodies over the walls of an Italian port town they were besieging, from where it may well have been carried back to Europe. Third he believes that the Travels of Marco Polo, who visited China when the Mongols were in power, influenced Christopher Columbus and the rulers of Portugal and Spain, who were keen to find sea routes to the east once Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, closing the overland trading routes. He talks too about how a distant relative of Genghis, Timur (or Tamburlaine as the English know him), had a descendant called Babur who seized power in India and founded the Mughal dynasty that only ended with the British in 1857. And so it goes. There’s so much detail in this book that it’s impossible to remember most of it but it is nevertheless fascinating and I’m hoping remnants of what I’ve learned will pop up at the appropriate times.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

This book had outstanding reviews. But from a pleb’s point of view, it was a difficult and depressing read. Ian McEwan has always tackled difficult subjects that raised impossible moral and ethical questions. His people are never particularly likeable. It’s not really fiction, it’s more philosophy. So this one is about a thirty something bloke called Charlie, his upstairs neighbour Miranda and a robot he has bought, called Adam. There are shades of The Tempest here. The robot has to be ethical but it puts into contrast the behaviour of the humans. At one point Charlie tells Adam it’s not always important to tell the truth, but of course this is what the whole novel revolves around and this is the point of difference between the humans and the robot. Perhaps it was me, but I felt I was wading through all these depressing ethical debates when I really wanted to be uplifted by something. And that just didn’t happen. There was no hopeful resolution. Having said all that, this wouldn’t be a bad book for book clubbers because there is just so much to debate in it.

Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

This is my second ‘serious’ book for the month, one of those tomes where you read a chapter at a time in order to take it all in with time for reflection. Amanda Foreman is a terrific biographer, someone who does excellent in-depth research but is capable of writing in an accessible, extremely readable style. There’s nothing dry about this biography at all – indeed I found myself itching to get back to it to discover the next chapter in the remarkable Duchess of Devonshire’s life. So, how about this woman, born in 1757 and active socially and politically and romantically for 49 years? What a personality! What influence. This is period where there’s a lot going on: the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Regency crisis and the madness of George III, the Napoleonic Wars, the ascendency of the Whigs. This is a period of really much greater female power, just before the ascendency of the Victorians, which put a stop to all that with pursed lips. Georgiana is in the middle of all of it, deeply involved with the Whigs, best buddies with the Prince, and moving in political circles as possibly the greatest influencer of the time. But wait there’s more: her lover and/or best friend, Bess, who moves in and becomes Georgiana’s husband’s lover as well, then a whole slew of other lovers and consequent illegitimate children for Georgiana, Bess, Georgiana’s sisters, the Duke. Oh yes, she’s a writer as well. It’s as engrossing as a soap opera but all of it is true. I read this after seeing The Favourite, the outrageously entertaining film about Queen Anne and the struggle for power between her two favourites/lovers. At the time I thought the director had been taking a bit of dramatic licence, but after reading about Georgiana’s world, I’m not at all sure! This is an unmissable read for anybody who is interested in history and this remarkable woman.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

It took quite a while to get through this book because I needed to stop after each chapter to try to process what I’d learned. I’d describe this book as popular science, in other words, scientific thought made accessible with clear writing, good story telling and examples, and patient logical explanations of complex issues. It traces the rise of humankind through revolutions: the cognitive revolution (put simply, the emergence of complex language that gave us the ability to imagine), the agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind (who said globalization was something recent?), and the scientific revolution. While I know the detail won’t stay with me – indeed most of it has disappeared already :( - what has stayed with me is the sense of human beings as mere animals who have exploited evolution to rise to dominance. There is no guaranteed future for us. I’ve often described myself as a humanist but although it is obvious if you think about it, I’ve never before considered that this puts homo sapiens on a pedestal above other life forms. As a humanist I am saying that the individual is the centre of all things. I’m really not sure how comfortable I am with this. So this is a book to get you thinking about all sorts of things about the human condition. It warrants re-reading.