Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Culture

Book Review: The Covenant of Water

REVIEW & SYNOPSIS

FROM the bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine. It is set in Kerala and follows three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new historical fiction novel by Abraham Verghese. His previous work, Cutting for Stone, published in 2009, became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast. It follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person perishes from drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family known as Big Ammachi – literally “Big Mother” – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life.

On display in this new work are all the great writing gifts of Verghese: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, great moments of humour, and the characters are imbued with a sense of life. It is a surprising and deeply moving story.

The Covenant of Water is a shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself. It is also a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding: a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.

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Arts, Books, Psychology, Science

Book Review: The Complete Guide to Memory

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you want to strengthen your mind, a new compendium exploring the mechanics of memory may be the place to start

IT IS all too easy to forget how much we rely on our memory and how quickly things can go south when it falters. Although the march towards forgetfulness is often presented as a foregone conclusion, it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s according to Dr Richard Restak in The Complete Guide to Memory, a short but comprehensive compendium of everything we know about memory and how we might improve it.

So-called brain training has been in vogue for decades in the form of sudoku puzzles or apps that promise to help you defy the cognitive decline of ageing, but there is little evidence for this.

Despite his book’s subtitle – The science of strengthening your mind – Dr Restak’s gambit is slightly different. He is a neuroscientist, author of more than 20 books on the human brain, and with decades of experience of patients with memory problems. Here he argues that by performing certain tasks to boost your memory, other mental faculties that rely on it will improve and you might ease the impact of old age.

Of course, memory isn’t one thing, but an interconnected series of brain structures and processes that interact with stimuli and consciousness in myriad ways. To understand how to improve it, an understanding of these processes is helpful, so Restak devotes a sizeable chunk of this book to teasing out the nuances of memory.

This includes episodic, semantic and procedural memory, how working and long-term memory differ, and how these are, in turn, formed from different stimuli, such as internal and external speech or visual information. It can feel like a whirlwind tour, and unless you take Restak’s advice to be attentive and intentional about remembering, the neuroscience will likely wash over you.

But understanding how different kinds of memories are made and stored does help make sense of the sections that follow, on how our brains use memory in daily life and what happens when these processes falter or start to go wrong.

The book is at its most enjoyable when Restak blends case study and personal anecdote to explore memory and what happens when faculties start to disengage.

Somewhat distressingly, the chapter devoted to memory’s malfunctions is almost as five times as long as the chapter that describes it working as intended – but, apart from rare brain injuries or traumatic events, these cognitive vulnerabilities are instructive.

For instance, knowing that advertisers and political campaigners tend to recycle and repeat the same catchphrases to evoke a sense of familiarity, and so prime you to remember them, could fortify you against manipulation in the future – or encourage you to use those same repetitious techniques for things you would like to remember.

The main way to improve all forms of memory, the author says, is to actively practise certain techniques, ideally daily. Some are as simple as attending to things more closely to expand long-term memory, while others are more involved, such as exercises and games that include memorising sequences of cards or numbers to boost working memory.

For all its emphasis on brain structure, the guide can feel frustratingly unstructured. Some curiosities, like the brain’s tendency to more easily recall interrupted tasks (the Zeigarnik effect) or that you remember things better when you see them on large screens, seem random and underexplored, with only a few paragraphs devoted to each and little about how you should incorporate them into your life.

Then there are its more eye-catching claims – for example, that memory exercises could help prevent memory decline in Alzheimer’s disease. Some might say that these rely too much on Dr Restak’s clinical experience and suffer from a lack of balanced discussion, essential for a book that has “avoid memory loss” on the cover and mentions Alzheimer’s on the first page.

Critical reviewers will likely still be pondering over the book’s anti-dementia credentials, although a few weeks of the daily memory exercises emphasised may well lead to a small boost in recall and help those who use them to feel more present.

The Complete Guide to Memory by Dr Richard Restak is published by Penguin Life, 208pp

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Arts, Books, Culture, History

Book Review: On Savage Shores

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: How indigenous Americans discovered Europe

IN 1528, Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, returned home from his travels in South America with “a large group of Nahua nobles”, along with entertainers, tumblers, dwarves, jaguars and an armadillo.

He also brought a team of about a dozen men who played a game of ullamaliztli, “the traditional Mesoamerican ball game”. They were brought home for the entertainment of the King of Spain. In the words of one Spanish observer, the ball itself was “made from the sap of certain trees and other mixtures, which made the ball bounce greatly”.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s utterly original new book, On Savage Shores, is full of such remarkable stories.

Her aim is to show us a kind of mirror-image of our familiar history: not of Western travellers in the New World, but of the remarkable number of native Americans who also made it over here. There were far more of them than most of us realised, and among other things, they may have introduced us to the joys of the bouncing rubber ball.

But in this great and often tragic clash of cultures, there are inevitably sadder stories of people lost, uprooted, or stricken with strange new diseases.

In 1576, the English explorer, Martin Frobisher, lost five of his crewmen, perhaps murdered, off the coast of Baffin Island, northern Canada. A year later he returned, still hoping to find his lost men – along with the legendary North West Passage to the Indies.

TOUCHING FRAGMENTS

AS a kind of bargaining chip, he seized a native man, woman and her baby, and brought them back to Bristol in October 1577. The Inuits’ names were Kalicho, Arnaq and Nutaaq, the baby’s name meaning, “Someone New”.

Pennock says Kalicho quickly became a local celebrity. Portraying the image of an Inuit hunter in Elizabethan Bristol, she writes: “Paddling up and down the river Avon at high tide in his canoe, and hunting ducks with bow and harpoon.”

Their lives were not long ones, however – nor were Elizabethan lives generally. Kalicho fell ill, tended by one Dr Edward Dodding, and died singing hymns “like the swan who foresees what good there is in death”. He was buried in St Stephen’s, Bristol, along with Arnaq, who probably died of measles.

Little Nutaaq was sent to London but had probably contracted measles as well. He was buried after only eight days in the churchyard of St Olave’s, in the City of London.

It is a touching fragment. But, as with so many stories uncovered here, it offers only a glimpse. Of the inner thoughts and lives of our New World visitors, we know nothing. Did they even want to go back? It’s unclear.

The author claims they were marginalised, silenced or even “erased” by their European hosts. A much more likely explanation is that they didn’t record such things in writing. Incidentally, we know barely anything of Shakespeare’s views and opinions, either.

Closer to us in time is the superbly sardonic account written by a Chippewa chieftain, Maungwudaus, who was part of a travelling show in the 19th century.

He was distinctly unimpressed by the apparent fragility of English gentlewomen: “English women cannot walk alone; they must always be assisted by the men.”

They are brought to the tea table “like sick women”, where they hold their knives and forks with two forefingers and thumb, the other two fingers of each hand “sticking out like fish-spears”.

Priceless. But the gentlemen fare little better, their luxuriant Victorian moustaches making them appear “as if they had black squirrels’ tails sticking out on each side of their mouths”.

The thorough-going bias of the book is tiresome. Pennock rightly criticises the old habit of calling native Americans “savages”, and then in the title applies it herself – to Europe!

An even-handed account would have been much better, with all those centuries of misunderstandings and conflicts, followed by treaties and other trade agreements.

One might prefer the account of Sir Walter Raleigh and his devoted native manservant, Harry, for an example of how people can transcend their narrow views and prejudices and become simply friends.

When Raleigh fell from grace in 1603 and was confined to the Tower, an indigenous man known only as Harry stayed with him for two years as his manservant. Later, it seems, Harry was given his freedom and returned home to the Americas.

When Raleigh was finally freed in 1616, he sailed again, “in one last search for gold and glory”.

Arriving at the mouth of the Cayenne River, “I sent my barge ashore to enquire for my servant Harry the Indien [sic]”.

Harry duly arrived with enough provisions for the English for at least a week. Raleigh, somewhat sick from the exhausting voyage, was carried kindly ashore and rested in a tent, eating pineapples, roasted peccary and armadillo.

He records his deep gratitude at “being fedd and assisted by the Indyans of my ould acquaintance with a greate deal of love and respect [sic]”.

As such anecdotes show, history is multi-faceted, and people are complicated.

Sometimes European colonists cruelly chained and enslaved native Americans; sometimes they actually rescued them, as the author hurriedly admits, from being sacrificed and even eaten by their own people.

Retrospective finger-wagging, or dividing the historical past into Goodies and Baddies, is just daft. Still, if you can put up with the authorial one-sidedness, there is much to learn and enjoy in this unusual history of a forgotten corner of our past.

– On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp

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