Book Reviews: 3 May
OUT NOW
CANDY KITTENS by Jamie Laing (Mitchell Beazley, £12.99; offer price, £10.99) What it is to be young and rich. Those of us privileged to have watched the posh reality TV show Made In Chelsea, will be fully au fait with the goings-on of Jamie Laing (he’s the barmy blonde one whose look of eager incomprehension has got him into more hot water than a crate of lobsters in a seafood restaurant).
You might even have witnessed the delivery of Jamie’s business plan for his girlie sweet shop called Candy Kittens, to his long-suffering accountant, and will therefore be wondering how the whole thing ever managed to get off the ground, let alone result in this book.
But here it is. Candy Kittens – recipes for sweets, biscuits and cakes, interspersed with advice on how to be a candy kitten (hang out on the King’s Road, design a friendship bracelet and employ key kitten styles to make you ‘as WHAA!’ as possible).
There’s even a page dedicated to Jamie’s vocabulary – some would say that’s half a page too long, but at least you now know how to answer the telephone (Yea Boi!) and what ‘Whaa’ means.
A free app lets you scan the cover and watch a video message from Jamie himself.
It’ll probably make the best present a 13-year-old girl will ever have.
Lola Sinclair
THE LITTLE BOOK OF DEATH by Neil R Storey (The History Press, £9.99; offer price, £9.49) A refreshingly lively anthology of odd, obscure, sometimes entertaining facts about death. In fewer than 200 pages, Storey ranges from the earliest Egyptian mummy ever found (an adult man who died more than 5,000 years ago) and portents of death (almost anything: cuckoos, bees, church clocks, owls, loaves of bread – take your pick), to the Norfolk pensioner who in 2011 had the message ‘do not resuscitate’ tattooed on to her chest. To avoid any confusion, she had also had PTO and an arrow inscribed on her back. The fi rst chapter contains a thoughtprovoking list of eccentric ways to expire, including Lord Palmerston who had a heart attack while having sex with a parlourmaid on his billiards table and a Maltese man who mistook a Second World War bomb for a harmless can and nailed it to a metal pipe. That particular way to expire was topped, as it were, by a Croatian man who tried to saw a hand grenade in half.
Theo Walden
BIRDSEYE by Mark Kurlansky (Anchor Books, £10.99; offer price, £9.89)Biography of the man who invented the frozen pea. Clarence Birdseye worked as a fur trapper in northern Canada. Stuck in the chilly wastes without any decent food, he noticed that fresh veg, wetted and left outside in minusdegree temperatures, froze in a way that maintained its integrity after thawing. Birdseye invented a way of replicating the process commercially and started the company that still bears his name. Kurlansky, whose other books include bestselling studies of Salt and Cod, is a terrifi c guide to the Birdseye life from his birth in 1886 in Brooklyn just as the icebox had become commonplace in the home, to his time in Canada, his marriage to Eleanor and the 200 or so patents he took out on more than 50 ideas. They ranged from an improved light bulb and a harpoon to an electric sunlamp. This is an intriguing, touching story of a man who was addicted to exploring new ideas and making them work. The most important thing about him, Kurlansky notes, was his ‘ability to live life as an adventure’.
TW
THE SOCIETY OF TIMID SOULS by Polly Morland (Profile Books, £14.99; offer price, £11.99) The Society Of Timid Souls was launched in 1942. Initially it was designed to help those with stage fright, but combined with the terrors of the Second World War, it gained huge success. Seventy years later, we’re just as scared it seems. Worried on a daily basis by terrorist attacks, economic meltdown or fatal illness – worries that often seem an inescapable part of ordinary life. So, are we brave to carry on regardless? Morland thinks so. Her book is both philosophical and anecdotal. In 2003 the advertising agency J Walter Thompson launched an anxiety index that tracked national anxieties year on year. In 2009, 73 per cent of Britons were anxious. In Russia, the percentage was 84 per cent. The Japanese came in at 90 per cent anxious and that, writes Morland ‘was before the earthquake and tsunami in 2011’.
Post Boston bomb and the security concerns for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, heaven knows what our national anxiety index is in 2013. Off the scale, perhaps. Morland’s book provides a little comfort however, even if only that we’re all in it together.
Peony Makepiece
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Another side of the Borgias
Sarah Dunant’s infamous family are more gifted than power-crazy, says Steve Barfield
BLOOD & BEAUTY by Sarah Dunant (Virago, £16.99; offer price, £13.99)
Dunant has previously written several critically and commercially successful historical novels set in the Italian Renaissance (The Birth Of Venus, In The Company Of The Courtesan, Sacred Hearts) and her latest novel extends her interests to that period’s arguably most infamous family: the Borgias.
While readers may be familiar with the Borgias from the recent sensationalist TV series, Dunant’s novel does much more to get under the skin of the characters involved. In Blood & Beauty, she concentrates on their cultured side as important patrons of the arts, as much as on their more familiar desire for power and wealth.
Dunant is adept in her storytelling skills and convincingly combines psychological insight into the family members – Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, a clever and charismatic Spaniard buying his way to the papal crown, his son Cesare, a man of ruthless intelligence later immortalised in Machiavelli’s The Prince, and 12-year-old daughter Lucrezia – with the political and cultural mores of the period, as well as evoking the sights, smells, sounds and simmering tensions of 15th-century Rome in all its beauty, brutality and corruption.
There is a strong sense of Borgia family history as well, joltingly evoked as we follow the Borgias from their ancestral origins to their greatest period in the Vatican. Lucrezia, for instance, develops from a pre-teenage girl into a woman who has had three dynastic marriages before the age of 20.
In Dunant’s hands, the Borgias come across as more gifted and rather less powercrazy than usually supposed – although there’s still plenty of old-school Borgia behaviour to chill the imagination – from the crimes of the fearlessly determined Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) to the rumoured incest and poisoning that surrounded Cesare and Lucrezia.
MUST BUY
A gem of a book THE GREAT GATSBY by F Scott Fitzgerald (Vintage Classics, £14.99; offer price £12.99)
Baz Luhrmann’s new screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby is out next month, and to celebrate, Tiffany & Co, who made all the jewellery that the main characters wear in the fi lm, has designed an accompanying cover for a new edition of the book itself. The result is a stylish, 1930s look underlined by green and silver art deco motifs set against black, all inspired by the Tiffany archive, including a 1930s magazine page showing the Paris façade of the new Tiffany store. A great collector’s item.
PAPERBACKS
GENTLEMEN & PLAYERS by Charles Williams (Phoenix, £9.99; offer price, £9.49) A book about amateur versus professional cricketers is also a social history of the country, so Williams’s amusing book, focusing on the fi nal 10 years of the amateur game, is revealing not only about cricket but also about the people and communities who play it. TW
LOTS OF CANDLES, PLENTY OF CAKE by Anna Quindlen (Windmill, £8.99; offer price, £8.54)
Quindlen began a column on life, 25 years ago in The New York Times. This is a kind of follow-up – musings on the business of growing old. Ask people what’s so terrible about it, she writes, and ‘almost everyone winds up admitting that they’re happier now than they were when they were young.’ You’re not doing it alone, is the message – and it could even be fun. LS
THE VINTAGE AND ANTIQUE FAIRS OF ENGLAND by Sandy Price (Frances Lincoln, £12.99; offer price, £10.99)
A pocket guide to the best, most regularly held markets for vintage, collectables and antiques in England. PM
ALSO PUBLISHED…
THE SERPENT’S PROMISE by Steve Jones (Little, Brown, £25; offer price, £20) Biblical tales recast in the light of modern science by geneticist Steve Jones. Is the Great Flood a memory of the end of the Ice Age, for instance, or can miracles reported by the faithful be explained by 21st-century medical knowledge? Jones’s conclusions are fascinating.
GRANTA 123: BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 4 (Granta, £12.99; offer price, £11.69)
Granta’s fourth list of top British writers aged 40 or under, which includes Zadie Smith, Joanna Kavenna, Adam Thirlwell and Ned Beauman, also offers a taste of 18 novels that are due out in the next year or two.
PRIZE-WINNING WRITER
Adrift in an alien landAdhya Toli on the life and career of the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who died last month aged 85, was the only person to have won the Booker Prize and the Oscar – for her screen adaptation of EM Forster’s A Room With A View and her adaptation of Howards End.
Prawer Jhabvala herself lived a very different life from those portrayed in Forster’s Edwardian dreamscape. She was born in Cologne to Jewish parents and her family was one of the last to flee the Nazi regime in 1939. They emigrated to Britain, spending the war years in Hendon. In 1948, her father committed suicide when he discovered that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust.
In 1951, she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect, and they moved to Delhi where Jhabvala remained ‘ill at ease with India and all it brought into my life… the great animal of poverty’. Indeed, the novels she wrote about India often focus on the disorientated foreigner adrift in an alien land – subtle tales of middle- and lower-class Indian life that those foreigners seldom saw. But it was her collaboration with the Merchant Ivory fi lm company that made her famous. She was approached by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant in 1963 to write a screenplay for their debut film The Householder, based on her 1960 novel. It became a critical success, resulting in a partnership that produced more than 20 fi lms, including Shakespeare Wallah, Heat And Dust and Howards End.
In 1975, Jhabvala moved to New York, where she died this year. She is survived by her husband, three daughters and six grandchildren.