Category Archives: Books

Books Feminism

Helga Estby: an almost-lost woman now deservedly famous

April 5, 2011 – 10:42 pm

Post first published on Blogcritics

Why were there no women geniuses, women great artists, women adventurers in the past? It’s a question often asked by obvious and not so obvious misogynists, and if you want an answer, beyond the obvious “what’s your problem?”, then Linda Lawrence Hunt’s Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America provides it: There were, but their stories have very often been lost.

Helga’s life is pretty well summed up by the term the adventurous. She had been born in Norway, seen her mother widowed and remarried, and at age 11 moved to Michigan, where she had to learn to use a new language in a new culture. Then at age 15, in circumstances we can no longer know, she was pregnant. This cannot not but have been a disaster for an unmarried girl in a quite conservative Scandinavian-American community. One month before she gave birth, the now 16-year-old married a 28-year-old non-English speaking Norwegian immigrant, most likely not the father of her child, and probably an arranged match to cover the family’s “shame”.
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Books Environmental politics Science

Trees: into mysticism and beyond to science

April 2, 2011 – 9:06 pm

Article first published on Blogcritics.

I would describe myself as “not the mystical sort”. That means that Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us is not an obvious book for me. But beyond its mystical side, it also contains a lot of science, and that’s what drew me to it. Particularly, it’s the sort of big picture science that helps you to see the world in new ways.

The author is described in the blurb as “a world expert on how trees connect the effect our environment” and the detailed knowledge and expertise behind the writing is obvious. Yet she puts this into something accessible and highly readable, the inspiration she says in the introduction, the traditional Irish storyteller. So The Global Forest is structured as 40 short essays, which range across key aspects of our global ecosystems, and historical and recent human interactions with them.

The basics are here. This the fact that in the 1950s 30% of global land was covered with forests, and in 2005 that figure was down to something like 5%. This the fact that the demand for paper, almost entirely reliant on trees, has led to exploding demand for pulp of 200 million tonnes a year for the Western world. And the fact that, despite the global garden offering a cornucopia of 80,000 potential food species, we now rely almost exclusively on eight food species. As the author says: “the traditional knowledge of the other 79,992 is rapidly being lost to future generations”.

And so are practical suggestions. One of the chief concerns of the book is the promotion of what she calls to two-tier agriculture, the combination of tree and ground crops in a “Savannah design”. The chief knowledge base is clearly grounded in North America, and she is fascinating on the subject of the nut crops and the nut milk Native Americans made from them. And also the future potential. “All of the hickory family produces particularly dense wood together with a colossal nut crop…. The hickory can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere like no other tree can. They have done this in the past enemy stretches of virgin forest and they can do it again.”

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Books Feminism

Reading Julia Kristeva

March 9, 2011 – 12:21 am

Julia Kristeva is one of those writers I feel I should read. And I did make a real effort after finding a new work from her, Hatred and Forgiveness (translated by Jenaine Herman), in the “new books” at the London Library. But I have to confess that I find the psychoanalytical approach to life seriously hard going – and frequently hard to stomach.

But I was pleased to learn this text marked her receipt of the Holberg Prize, and I did like the way in a historical survey of female writers she picked out as “the first female intellectual”, Anne Comnena (Anna Komnen). This is Kristeva’s account:
“…she was the author of a superb history of the crusades and the reign of her father, the Emperor Alexis I. This was the nomumental Alexiade, in fifteen volumes. Born in 1083, Comnena began writing this work in 1138 at the age of fifty-five, and completed it ten years later: as the first female historian, she offers us an interpretation of this period that is very different from those of western chroniclers such as William of Tyre or Foucher de Chartes. This devotee of what would later be called orthodox Christianity was nevertheless raised on the Greek classics and a fervent reader of Homer and Plato. She was sensitive, melancholy and indeed romantic, a girl who was proud of her father: she was a philosopher and a politician, and her writing shows an awareness of the need for European unity, which was such an important issue at that time.” (p.5-6)

I also found her interesting on…

On the virgin status of Mary:
“Her virginity constitutes the major scandal: our sensibility and simple reason can only denounce the dreadful inequty this virginity exposes, women’s exclusion from sexuality: a punitive chastity that seems to be the price women must pay for admission to the sacred– and to representation.” (p. 64)

On Colette:
“..the amorous Colette, endlessly betrayed and endlessly betraying, declared herself beyond romantic passion, “one of the great banalities of existence” from which one had to escapre, provided one was capable of participating in the plurality of the world – in a fulfillment of the ego through a multitude of ‘gay, varied and plentiful’ connections.” (p. 224)

On Georgia O’Keeffe:
“…you probably had to be a modern woman to decide that the sparest and most final image of death was the pelvic bone: this basin at the bottom of the spine that houses the lower abdomen and sexual organs, and that, deprived of flesh, is nothing but a coarse ring – the void itself…. THe Pelvis series… recall the Taoist representation of the sky, and Pi, a circle of jade with a hole, symbol of male emptiness.” (p. 243)

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Books Environmental politics Politics

The culture of the bicycle

February 24, 2011 – 10:39 am

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

As an occasional participant in London’s Critical Mass, as a regular “it’s the best way to get around” cyclist on the streets of the British capital, and as a campaigner who thinks that cars get far, far too much consideration when it comes to town planning, when I saw One Less Car in Edinburgh’s bookshop, I just had to pick it up.

It’s the first history that I’ve seen of the politics of the bicycle, and while I know quite a bit about the late 20th century and early 21st-century campaigns around cycling, I knew little of what came before.

I now feel far more informed, although I was glad as I read of my sometimes too close knowledge of cultural studies and associated jargon, for the author, Jack Furness, his field as assistant professor of cultural studies at Columbia College Chicago, and it shows. Although to be fair, it’s pretty hard to talk about the Situationists, as Furness does, without using their jargon. He quotes Pierre Canjuers and Guy Debord: “A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile … S essentially means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the centre of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market.” (p54)
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Books History

Shining light on what really aren’t the Dark Ages

February 21, 2011 – 11:32 pm

A shorter version of this post was first published on Blogcritics.

I find the post-Roman period of European history fascinating. Today we live in a world in which the idea of progress – that next year’s computer must be better than last year’s – is all-pervasive. Yet for many centuries Euopeans lived in the shadow of buildings far greater than anything they could hope to build, with crumbling technology they couldn’t hope to replace, in societies whose institutions were visibly degrading. it was a very different world, and one that I find psychologically fascinating.

So when mediaeval history e-mail list came up with an almost unanimous recommendation for Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, I had to lay hands on a copy. And I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty of detail in his account, including an introduction to some great women of the period, (and lots about Burgundy, where I have a special local interest) but where this book really shines is in its analysis of general trends and explanation of the big changes of the period. He’s always trying to answer the “why” question – always I think the most interesting one.

And he’s looking for the big picture. So one of his big themes is the importance of land tax collection for the maintenance of a centralised, complex administrative state, and a sophisticated economy. That’s what Rome had in spades, but it fell apart quickly in the west, with aristocracies and societies becoming much more localized and usually poorer.

Another big theme is the relative power of royalty, aristocracy and peasantry. “A strong state essentially depended on peasant exploitation. We cannot easily say which peasants would have preferred: the security most powerful rulers ould give them (a security which was only relative; the reigns of Justinian, Charlemagne and Basil II have all left clear evidence of local violence and oppression); all the autonomy, and lower rents and tributes, which most peasants had in the small and weak polities of Britain or the Slav and Scandinavian worlds before the 10th century; and autonomy which was risky if stronger invaders came through on rating enslaving expeditions…. ( I think they would have preferred autonomy.)” (p. 559)
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Books Women's history

The women of early medieval Europe – not such ‘dark ages’

February 21, 2011 – 12:15 am

I’ve been reading Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, and found some wonderful women, most of whom I’ve not previously encountered.

Some of the earliest he’s able to introduce are the Frankish aristocrats of the Merovingian period.

“The few women in the Merovingian period who made surviving wills without the participation of a male relative (because they were widows all consecrated nuns, like Erminethrudis or Ermintrude in Paris around 600 and Burgundofara in Faremoutiers in 634) also possessed much less land than the aristocratic norm; autonomous female actors were, once again, in a relatively fragile situation. Aristocratic women could nonetheless choose to consecrate themselves to virginity and found monasteries, as numerous saints lives tell. These lives tend to stress the opposition of the fathers to such a choice (as opposed to one of marriage the vantage of the family), and the support of their mothers. As Regine Le Jan notes, this has to be a topos, a narrative cliche: in reality, such female monasteries were very much part of family strategies, and women like Burgundofara of Faremoutiers or Gertrude of Nivelles, and the monasteries they founded, prospered and faltered as the families (respectively the Faronids/Agilofings and the Pippinids) prospered and faltered.”

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