Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Psychology, Science

Book Review – ‘Headhunters: The Search For A Science Of The Mind’

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

IN March 1898, a group of scientists set sail from London for the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea. The purpose of their embarkation was to study local islanders in the hope that they would learn important lessons about the way the human brain works.

Equipped with various colour photographs and some ‘footer shirts’, the researchers were confident these would prove irresistible to the natives.

For the following 15 months or so, they conducted a series of tests – one scientist would measure people’s sight, another hearing, another skin sensitivity, and so on. On their return to London, the team presented their findings to the British Association For The Advancement Of Science.

The exercise was a total disaster. Far from showing any major differences between the way in which a Bornean tribesman perceived the world and, say how a Cambridge academic did, their tests revealed almost no variations at all. The Association believed that only one conclusion could be drawn: the tests had been hopelessly botched. As a result the scientists’ efforts were poo-poohed with their reputations smeared and blackened.

Over the next few years, though, doubts began to creep in. Maybe the fact that there were no key differences between people’s senses wasn’t actually a blunder after all, but rather a discovery of huge significance and relevance. Viewed from the aspect that, far from being a human evolutionary ladder – as was generally accepted – in which the British stood at the top with everyone else on the lower rungs, maybe the inference implied by the group was that we were all essentially the same.

With their reputations restored, the scientists set out once again, and were eager to find out and track how the human brain developed in the way that it did. Originally, smell was by far the dominant sense, but as mammals began to evolve such as when they began to live in trees, sight, sound and taste surged to the fore.

The difficult part, as far as the scientists were concerned, was how to measure things that seemed to defy analysis – like pain or the way people react to stress.

One of the members of the original expedition, a psychologist called William Rivers, conducted a series of experiments with a fledgling neurologist. The two men would sit in the neurologist’s rooms in Cambridge, with Rivers pulling out the hairs of his fellow researcher and sticking needles into various parts of his body. The results were recorded.

Not surprisingly, the neurologist found that he could work for only an hour at a time before he started to feel a bit queasy. In between sessions, the two men would engage in bursts of vigorous exercise such as running or horse-riding. The results were encouraging, but what they really wanted was a kind of mass experiment in which large numbers of people could be subjected to the same trauma to see how they reacted. They didn’t have to wait long.

In August 1914, World War I was declared. Within months, Rivers and his fellow scientists were confronted with what amounted to the biggest laboratory on Earth.

A number of different aspects came under observation, but none interested them more than the effects of prolonged exposure to gunfire. Although it was another of the original expedition team members, Charles Myers, who coined the phrase ‘shell shock’, it was Rivers’s work at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh (where poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were among his patients) that proved the most significant.

At first, Army doctors would label traumatised soldiers ‘Mental’, ‘Insane’ or even ‘GOK’ (‘God Only Knows’). But as the war went on and it became obvious that soldiers were not faking their symptoms, attitudes started to change and treatments started to improve.

Yet, the psychologists were still feeling their way in the dark. William McDougall, another researcher who had also set sail on the original expedition, treated a soldier called Percy Meek, who had been a basket-weaver in Norfolk before the war. As well as having severe shell shock, Meek was diagnosed as suffering from amnesia.

Under hypnosis, he revealed that he was visited every night by the ghost of a German soldier whom he had killed on the Marne in 1914.

After a while Meek stopped seeing the ghost, but his condition became even worse – his twitching became more pronounced, he lost the power of speech and spent all day playing with dolls. There is an astonishing archive film of him cowering in a wheelchair with a teddy bear on his knee.

McDougall was inclined to write him off as a helpless case, but then, in 1917, something extraordinary happened: Meek made a spontaneous recovery.

His memory and his speech came back, and within another year he was teaching basket-weaving to fellow patients – proof perhaps that the brain is even more complex and mysterious than McDougall and his colleagues had ever anticipated.

As Ben Shepherd proved with his critically acclaimed A War of Nerves: Soldiers And Psychiatrists 1914-1994, the author writes exceptionally well about how the mind functions under duress.

Shepherd’s account of how a small group of scientific researchers defied ridicule in their quest to learn how the brain works is as stirring as it is dramatic. Whilst it is clear from the narrative that he possesses a sharp eye for absurdity, there’s also a broad streak of sympathy that runs throughout.

It’s tempting to see Shepherd’s story as an illustration of how psychology has developed in this country. There may have been quite a few wrong turns as this science has developed, but eventually its pioneers steered a path through a fog of confusion to reach a greater understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way.

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Arts, Books, Legal, Society

Book Review: ‘The Collini Case’

Intro: Fabrizio Collini is a hard working, quiet and respectable man. Until the day he visits one of Berlin’s most luxurious hotels and kills an innocent man in cold blood. A murder. A murderer. No motive

ONE

IT was routine during the Second World War that both Germans and the Allies shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One would be alarmed to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be deemed legitimate. Yet, in 1941, Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. Indifference aside, one would be tempted to ask how high is too high?

It is this question which fundamentally plagued the defence of an Italian man, Fabeizio Collini, some sixty years later. The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach, is based upon that historical trial.

Since the Nazi regime ended in cataclysmic defeat, like many of his generation, and some contemporaries even with a comparable heredity, von Schirach (born in 1964) is, not surprisingly, still dealing with the fall-out. That seems implicitly written into this philosophical legal thriller.

Collini, a very large man, purports to be a journalist. He walks into a luxury hotel suite in Berlin and murders Hans Meyer, the old man he has arranged to interview. Located near the Brandenburg Gate, he repeatedly shoots him from behind, and stamps his skull until it no longer resembles a skull. Collini sits in the hotel lobby and waits to be arrested by the police. Von Schirach describes the killing and post mortem with an entirely appropriate, but eerie economy and use of words.

Collini admits he did it, but the motive for doing so is unapparent. He refuses to say why he committed murder, and indeed says next to nothing.

A young and recently graduated defence lawyer, named Caspar Leinen, is assigned the case. It is his first, but it seems hopeless. His client refuses to say anything, except that he is not interested in being defended. Leinen discovers that the murdered man was a rich industrialist, who was also the grandfather of Leinen’s closest school friend, Philipp, who is now dead, killed in a car crash. Leinen used to spend holidays on the Meyer’s country estate, and fell in love with Philipp’s sister, Johanna. She insists he can’t defend this monster who had murdered her grandfather, the benign old man with whom Casper used to play chess. Leinen considers withdrawing from the case given the conflict of interest that arises, but is deterred from doing so after a conversation with a famous and highly respected defence lawyer, Mattinger, who made his name by successfully defending members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, and was a strong believer and advocate of the constitutional state (founded on law). Leinen is convinced and commits himself to Collini’s defence. As it happened, Mattinger becomes recruited by the Meyers Corporation as an accessory prosecutor, and becomes Leinen’s main opponent in the trial.

TWO

WERE it not for the fact that the trial had to be unexpectedly interrupted due to the illness of one of the judges, the case would have been briskly concluded and Leinen would have lost. Instead, he has an extra ten days to pursue a line of inquiry that, if successful, might well mean Collini being discharged.

All at once, the novel becomes a meditation on the law, a discussion of the difference between judicial guilt and moral culpability. Von Schirach’s characteristically spare prose could have been written with an icicle. He uses fewer adjectives than the opening by-line to this novel by Hemingway, resolutely refusing to impose emotions on the reader. Although the spectre of the Nazi past broods over this book, it is not about then, but now. In an article in Der Spiegel, written a few years ago when the book was first published in German, von Schirach maintained that he was more interested in the present than of the generations before him. In the author’s own words The Collini Case is a ‘book about the crimes committed in our state, about vengeance, guilt and the things we continue to fail at even today.’

Nevertheless, we cannot detach that the things we do today have a history. The law in any country is a complex historical document and the past it embeds continually reaches out its cold fingers to touch the present. A note at the end of the book informs the reader that this novel was a point of reference for a public inquiry into the mark left on the German Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past.

The impact of the novel’s 180 or so pages, in which not a word is wasted, is far greater than any legal thriller treble its size. The importance of the ideas contained within the narrative, combined with the meticulous unemotional prose, provides the reader with a book that is both fascinating and moving.

THREE

THE CASE draws upon the Statute of Limitations, but the existence of that law raises a philosophical point which von Schirach doesn’t really address: to what extent do we remain responsible for acts committed long ago? Is a man in his seventies like Hans Meyer the same person in his twenties? Statutes of limitations, which are found in most European legal codes (but not in ours) recognise that liability for even terrible crimes may expire.

The novel is written in a dry, flat style, but it is extremely persuasive. The trial scenes are excellent and well-thought through, and von Schirach confronts the question of the limitations of the law by inviting us to ask what justice is. Mattinger tells Leiten that ‘judges can’t decide according to what seems politically correct. If Meyer acted correctly by the standards of the time, we can’t blame him for it today.’ Leiten disagrees, believing that we can judge the past because ‘we’ve made progress.’ Mattinger says this opinion is an expression of the ‘zeitgeist’: ‘I believe in the laws and you believe in society. We’ll see who turns out to be right.’

It would take a dull reader of this tense and taut book not to ponder over the questions being asked: are we entitled to judge the past? If so, how far back should that extend? The Collini Case is disturbing precisely because there is no conclusive answer to be given. Even with Collini, who has acted with certainty, ends by saying ‘sorry for everything’. Yet, he accompanies this apology to Casper Leinen with a photograph which asserts that his act of revenge was indeed just. The reader may agree, while remaining aware of the implications of going beyond the law to rectify the failures, or apparent failure, of the Law and the legal system.

The German legal system of the mid twentieth-century was often described as being knotty, tangled and convoluted, perhaps because many of its secrets stemmed directly from the War. Or, maybe, because the contemporary German legal system is so dramatically unlike that which exists in Britain, one could easily find oneself forgetting that Collini’s trial is set in the twenty-first century.

As a character, Leinen would seem more at home in the 1930s. The reader could qualify this through his daily routine which, to all intent and purposes, is fairly grey and timeless. His legal colleagues may speak in court of the zeitgeist, but that zeitgeist is rarely on show in this novel. For Leinen, for the prosecutor Mattinger – and conceivably too for von Schirach, himself a prominent German defence attorney – the reader may deduce or feel inclined to think that the long hours spent in chambers has precluded their full immersion in society. It is this lack and deficiency which contributes to the oppressive, grey mood that weighs down on the pages of this book.

The narrative isn’t a comfortable story, but it is an important one. It is well documented that von Schirach’s late grandfather, Baldur, was the Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi Party, sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials. The Collini Case clearly resonates on a personal, but also on a more universal human level. Like the central hall of the law court itself, with the allegorical figures and lofty walls and high ceilings which overawe Leiden, which make him feel small relative to the law, the reader is likely to find him or herself surprisingly sucked into the perturbations of justice unfurled in this case.

Like the best murder and crime fiction novels, The Collini Case has a twist to it. The reader is left to think given the legal arguments that are presented from either side. Ferdinand von Schirach has a family history that lends a particular poignancy to this brief and compelling novel.

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Arts, Books, History, Scotland, Spain

Book Review: ‘Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War’…

SCOTLAND: ANSWERING A CALL

SEVENTY FIVE years ago, in 1938, the International Brigades were disbanded. Never was there a better time to document and celebrate those Scots who fought, and often died, in the 20th century’s first international battle against fascism.

In many ways the term ‘Spanish Civil War’ is a misnomer. Most people knew it was no more than a rehearsal for an even bloodier conflict to come, and that the ideas being killed and died for – communism, revolution-ism, parliamentary democracy and fascism – would go on to shape the future of the entire world.

Some 549 men and women from Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Lothian farmlands and the Highlands are known to have left for what was then a distant and alien country. They went illegally, as the British Government had, shockingly, adopted a policy of non-intervention in the face of yet another European country falling to a Nazi ally.

The book, acknowledged in its foreword by Tony Benn as being ‘important and powerful’, is not only a culmination of extensive academic research but a personal gathering of information from relatives of those engaged in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

The book, acknowledged in its foreword by Tony Benn as being ‘important and powerful’, is not only a culmination of extensive academic research but a personal gathering of information from relatives of those engaged in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Although the British, French, and American governments proclaimed support for the freely elected Spanish Republic, their every move in the war betrayed their preference for a victory by the rebel generals over a communist or, even worse, a revolutionary Spain. The Scottish volunteers crept over the border at Perpignan after an uncomfortable journey, many of them having covered long tracts of it on foot and with little to eat on the way. They fought together with Spaniards, Italians, Russians, Germans, Irish and many other nationalities at Albacete, Jarama, the Aragon Front and in the Battle for Madrid. More than 2000 British soldiers fought; over a quarter of those Scots that travelled never returned.

 

ALMOST a quarter of all British volunteers were from Scotland; more than most other countries by head of population. It was an extraordinary level of commitment, and defiance, for a small nation. People of all classes signed up for the fight against Franco’s version of ultra-conservative Catholicism, but the majority of those committed to the cause came from working-class areas such as Shettleston and Calton. Their stories, though, have never been adequately told. Daniel Gray has done them justice.

Mr Gray was perfectly placed in writing this book. A curator at the National Library of Scotland, he is in his element amongst archives and historical records, histories and memoirs. For Gray’s cleverly titled book, he has drawn on national and overseas sources, and has organised a very complex story into a well-constructed and compelling narrative. Daniel is a capable writer; his prose is unfussy, fluent and warm. Pointedly, he has squared the circle of producing accurate history while retaining a deep respect for those who archive and steward it. Homage to Caledonia is in no way hagiography – a chapter is dedicated on those Scots who supported Franco – but, Mr Gray’s admiration for those volunteers who risked their lives is subtle and elegant.

Daniel Gray has a remarkable intuitive sense in knowing when to let the soldiers, nurses and writers tell their own stories. Sydney Quinn’s testament, for instance, is expressed:

…Whenever I see the thousands of Spanish children streaming along the road away from the fascists, my thoughts revert back home, and I can see you and your brothers in the same circumstances if we don’t smash the fascist monsters here.

Mr Quinn wrote that paragraph to his family back in Glasgow on the eve of going into action against fascism.

Steve Fullarton wrote from the thick of battle:

… I found George Jackson lying stretched out. George came from Cowdenbeath … Charlie McLeod of Aberdeen was lying with his head on George Jackson’s chest. And Malcolm Smith was lying about a yard or so away. All were dead…

Gray studies the reasons for the Scots’ decision to volunteer. Over half were affiliated in one way or another to the Communist Party. Garry McCartney, a blacksmith from Dennistoun, commented:

…We weren’t fighting for communism; we just wanted to beat the fascists.

The personal letters of David Murray, a member of the Independent Labour Party, cast a fascinating light on Spanish anarchists and those who fought alongside them. The death of Larkhall’s Bob Smillie, for instance, whose death to this day still divides the Scottish left – did he die of natural causes or was he kicked to death by Spanish Communists? Ethel Macdonald, the so called ‘Scottish Scarlet Pimpernel’, who reported from within the anarchist camp in Barcelona, vehemently documents the belief in the latter. Mr Gray’s chapter on MacDonald is a revealing examination of the fault-lines on both the Scottish and Spanish left.

 

FOR the men and women who went to fight, or to help in whatever capacity they could, doctrinal differences were of little or no importance. Rather, a sense of solidarity – amongst the Scots themselves and the volunteers from countless countries – and a sense of fighting at an historic and honourable moment:

…One day we shall tell our children about the defence of Madrid; this epic story can never die in the pages of world history. I think of Jock Cunningham from Coatbridge out in Spain… leading his men fearlessly and unafraid, dancing with death.

Daniel Gray has written a deeply moving account of one part of human history that is thought-provoking and vividly emotional, not only of those 549 Scottish people, but of two nations – Scotland and Spain – battling with an evil that would soon darken the whole of Europe.

– ‘Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War’ written by Daniel Gray is published by Luath Press for £16.99. 

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