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 William Blacker spent years of his life in Romania from the early 90′s onwards. Longing for a simpler life, like that he’d experienced during his idyllic rural English childhood, he found the perfect match in rural Romania. People there still seldom watched TV and spent most of their lives at work in the countryside, harvesting and living off the land as their ancestors had done for generation after generation. It’s an image of not only the Romanians themselves, but the gypsies that live with them, and the disappearing other segments of the population as the steady march of modernisation takes yet another corner of the unspoiled world.
I bought this book on a whim over a year ago and finally got around to reading it – I’ve recently become interested in the little pockets of Europe outside of my own knowledge, generally sticking to eastern Europe, and so this seemed like a perfect match. I found it even more interesting than I’d suspected, not only for Blacker’s experience, but for the comparisons he makes with medieval Europe, a topic with which I am very well acquainted.
First of all, the Romania he portrays is very much a rural idyll, so much so that I couldn’t help but feel some of the rougher areas were a little bit glossed over. It calls to the ideal of the rural peasant, happy to work, happy with life in general, free of superficial trappings of modern life like telephones, televisions, possessions, and so on. He also quotes from Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, which is an old piece of scholarship that has been discredited in many ways by current medieval historians, a lot of which I read, and which put me on edge. I couldn’t help but feel that some of the problems of rural life, like bad harvests and lack of leisure time, were glossed over. Maybe the people did seem happier and more welcoming to him, and maybe they were, but he focused on other problems instead. It made for a very engaging read, and certainly I’d love to visit Romania now, but I questioned a lot of this as I read.
Blacker also spends a considerable amount of time with the gypsies, as the “love” in the subtitle alludes to, somewhat flabbergasted by their complete lack of preparation for life. The women, for instance, exist to do seemingly nothing but dance and charm foreign men, as Blacker discovers, and the gypsies almost always found themselves begging over the course of the winter as they failed to preserve enough food to last the whole season. Contrasted with the rural farmers, their lives seem confusing. He also meets some Germans, who even speak German, but return to the motherland over the course of the novel and find city life a difficult adjustment.
I think this review has already made it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, which just isn’t true; I loved the descriptions of Romanian culture and people and Blacker’s experiences integrating into their society and trying to understand how things might have been. The book also has pictures in the middle, which helped, and I was outright fascinated by the idea that these people have been living the same way for centuries. They might have paved roads now, but the “good old days” such as they were do make for an excellent book.
I’d recommend Along the Enchanted Way if you, too, are interested in how life might be in the corners of forgotten Europe, but I’d take it with a little pinch of salt.
 One of the richest heiresses in eighteenth century Georgian Britain, Mary Eleanor Bowes had every reason to expect a glowing future. Educated beyond her female peers, indulged by her father, and pampered with every possible luxury, the young heiress satisfied her taste for literary and botanical endeavours, but at the same time was a very poor judge of men. When Andrew Robinson Stoney, a handsome Irish soldier, was gravely injured in a duel for her honour, she married him almost immediately, told that he had only days to live. To her surprise, he recovered within hours of their marriage and proceeded to wreak a brutal reign of terror on her life, beating, kidnapping, and imprisoning her and any other females who fell too closely within his grasp.
But Mary Eleanor wouldn’t endure his tyranny forever, and her fight back, for herself and her children, resulted in hope for all abused wives throughout Britain.
What a fascinating book. This popular history, which reads almost like a novel at times, traces the fall of an incredibly rich and privileged woman due to a couple of bad, life-changing decisions, and is a fascinating look at how a single man could ruin the lives of everyone around him. Stoney wasn’t even born particularly highly, but by simply using his attractiveness and ability to lie guilelessly, he managed to bag himself not one but two heiresses. By the standards of their day, his treatment was judged out of the ordinary, but both of his wives had very little power to free themselves from his clutches.
Mary Eleanor Bowes herself was a very compelling character and I felt for her very strongly throughout the course of the book. She was spoiled when young, and did obviously have bad judgement and suffered from a lack of maturity despite her rather more advanced book learning, but none of that meant that she deserved to be so ill-treated. I found all of the struggles she went through to finally free herself to be enlightening – married women under 18th century law genuinely had zero rights. She no longer owned any of the property her father had bestowed on her, as her new husband forced her to renounce her prenuptial contract keeping her own income and properties, and was kept a virtual prisoner by servants hired by her husband. She had nothing, not even her children most of the time.
Her fight to regain those rights is engaging and heartening, as it must have been for any of the women of her time following the case. It made me very glad that I wasn’t born in the eighteenth century, and that so many women before me fought for our gender, as I hope we continue to do so. Indeed, Moore lists when women gained some of the rights Mary Eleanor deserves, and some of them are depressingly recent, which only underscores the fact that there is still so much ground we need to gain.
A peek into the real-life trauma of a disastrous eighteenth century marriage, Mary Eleanor’s fight for her life and family in Wedlock makes for fascinating reading, even as it reminds us of how much women have fought for their rights over the past couple of hundred years.
 Roald Dahl wrote some of my favorite childhood books. I’ll never forget James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, or any of the other amazing books that he wrote for children, and I fully intend to share them with my own children someday. But a couple of the ones I found most interesting were the memoirs he wrote about himself, Boy and Going Solo. I was naturally very eager to learn more about his life, and Sturrock’s biography was a brilliant choice for doing exactly that.
Charting Roald’s life, from his immediate ancestry to his death, Sturrock does an amazing job communicating what sort of man Dahl was. He doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult aspects of his life, or the way that he manipulated his own past when it suited him – mainly, it becomes clear that Dahl was a storyteller in all respects, and if he thought he could make his life more interesting by telling tales about it, he was happy to do so. While I wasn’t thrilled to discover that both Boy and Going Solo had a large degree of fictionalization, I was still eager to discover the actual, documented truth, and indeed there is a considerable amount of that here thanks to archives, research, and interviews consulted and conducted by Sturrock. Sturrock had also met Dahl before his passing, and so shares personal knowledge of him with us.
There is so much here that I’d never really guessed at it; I knew he’d written darker stories for adults, but I had never really known about his many love affairs, the true misery of his childhood, the losses he suffered in his own life both as a child and an adult, nor his crotchety and sometimes difficult personality. Sturrock liberally quotes from the author’s letters and documents, and I felt like I was genuinely getting to know him and connect him with the author I knew. His writing style is distinctive, and the picture Sturrock tells is cohesive. It’s in no way idealized; it makes him into a fully rounded person, which I think is the best possible result of a biography such as this one. Sturrock is equally praising of the author’s merits, especially his unflagging commitment to children’s literature and charitable work, as he is critical of other aspects of his life.
Naturally, I also found the circumstances around Dahl’s life to be fascinating. An attendee at a British boarding school, a pilot during World War II, and then an up-and-coming writer with a Hollywood star as his wife, Dahl lived through a considerable amount of exciting twentieth century history. I enjoyed Sturrock’s distillation of the facts and the way he built the background around Dahl’s life; it helped ground me and made the rest of the book wonderful reading.
A detailed and intensely appealing biography about one of the world’s best known children’s writers, Storyteller is worthy of a place in the library of any Roald Dahl fan.
 Home is probably the most cherished place in the world for most of us. We spend huge chunks of our lives cleaning, decorating, organising, and simply enjoying our homes, but how has the house change throughout history? What would our houses tell us about what went on in them before? Lucy Worsley tackles this topic by exploring the history and evolution of four different kinds of room in an English house, from the medieval period right through to the present. The living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom are Worsley’s subjects, but the people who populate them truly make them what they are, and this is a fascinating journey.
I must admit a little bit of bias and prior knowledge of this book. The series, hosted by Worsley, was actually televised here in the UK over four episodes, one for each room. So I already knew that I was interested in the subject matter (although that wasn’t a surprise) and I’d picked up many of the facts previously. If you have seen the show, though, the book adds bits and pieces and draws more conclusions from Worsley’s experiences living certain aspects of old-fashioned lives.
Social history, for me, is completely addictive; I love finding out why there might be a shoe hidden in my attic or how recently some British homes actually got proper bathrooms and plumbing. There are Victorian ash-midden privies in my little garden and, even though now they’re considered “outbuildings”, that little slice of history is one of the things I love about England. Worsley gives equal time here to the ordinary and the aristocratic, particularly because in many cases developments made for the wealthy finally trickled down to the poor.
Worsley’s writing style is also very engaging and the book is a pleasure to read. There are plenty of endnotes, but this is not dry history at all. It’s full of facts that I’m sure I will regale people with for weeks to come, lots of curiosities about how our homes actually got to be the way they are and how differently people treated them. Consider the bedroom, once simply integrated into the main living space with little to no privacy, which slowly migrated to becoming one of the most private places of all, especially as the living room took its place.
One of the most interesting aspects of a book like this, for me, is how the home can highlight just how much society has changed. Just one part of this is obviously the presence of servants in our lives. Not that long ago, a huge proportion of the population was employed in service, a respectable occupation and one that had a huge part to play in the development of the home. Some things certainly wouldn’t have been possible without servants – older kitchen ranges, for example, required daily cleaning and blacking, not to mention the issues surrounding the chores of actually preparing and serving food. The monumental shift away from servants, along with the inventions and innovations that replaced them, have played a role in the development of the home today.
All in all, If Walls Could Talk is a fascinating journey through the home, a joy to read, and a trove of worthy little details for those interested in the history of ordinary people as well as royalty. Definitely recommended.
All external book links are affiliate links. I received this ebook for free for review.
 How can one write a history of the entire world? It’s not an easy task, and could never be accomplished by a single being. Dr. Neil MacGregor has opted to take the approach of presenting 100 objects from the British Museum, in chronological order, which pick out some of the strands of civilization’s history and which attempt to show us how everything is related and interwoven.
This is a very intriguing book, although as you would expect, it really only scratches the surface and is very, very top-level. The 100 objects are grouped in five for each chapter and tend to come from all over the world. It’s rare for there to be two objects from similar European countries, for example; this does provide a really interesting view of history as we can see what’s happening around the world all at once, even if that is at a surface level.
The objects in the book spread from civilization’s earliest hours to the present day, including a credit card and a solar-powered lamp. Even the author comments on how our choices of what may reflect our society today will not necessarily be the choices made in 100 years, and perhaps the curator in 2112 will be as intrigued by those selections as any others. History, it is fascinating, even more so when you consider the fact that it is happening all around us all the time.
All of the objects included are at the British Museum in London; they’re marked in the museum itself, so you can follow through and try and find all 100. I’m not sure if they were all on display, but I did visit a few on a recent visit to London. For example, here are the Lewis chessmen:
Even though the book has a gorgeous, full colour image of each object, it was still exciting to see a few of them in person, although not exciting enough for me to trek around the entire museum for it.
The British Museum is also a perfect subject because, in many ways, it reflects the overarching theme of a dominant culture taking over smaller ones, something that keeps happening throughout the book with lost civilizations. Sometimes their voices are heard again, as in the case of the Rosetta stone, but sometimes they are truly lost, and we can only speculate. The museum itself is a remnant of Britain’s imperial past, and these treasures may have been contested; the simple fact that they’ve ended up in London from all parts of the globe is a tale worth telling, and which is told for quite a few of them.
I spent a considerable amount of time with A History of the World in 100 Objects and I found it to be a fascinating read, easily digestible in chunks given the nature of the chapters. Not for anyone looking for an indepth history, but for a thoughtful overview, this is perfect.
I purchased this book.
 Subtitled “The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”, Susan Cain’s Quiet takes us on a journey through history and into the present, understanding why exactly introverts and the skills that they have are devalued in present day American culture. We also take a look into the brains of introverts and whether it’s nature or nurture that turns some of us inward and others outward. She then offers helpful hints on how introverts can deal with modern careers and find space for themselves in a world that demands meetings and presentations as indicators of business success. Rounding out the book with interviews and advice for parents with introverted children, Cain has provided an interesting study of many different aspects of “sensitive” personality types.
I am decidedly an introvert, and I imagine most people reading this blog are too – in general, we are people who need space away from the world to recharge our batteries, people for whom speaking in public is a struggle, and who essentially work best on our own. Cain offers a lot of definitions and also provides a little list towards the start of the book to help readers identify if they are actually introverts – she also takes pains to stress throughout that many people actually have aspects of both introversion and extroversion. This is not a black-and-white science.
I found it quite inspiring to read about how many introverts have changed the world. As an introvert who has learned to cope surprisingly well (I’m always shocked when someone doesn’t think I’m shy, and it happens more often than you’d think), I definitely felt refreshed by the knowledge that lots of other people do better with space to contemplate. The history of the subject was also interesting, especially the ways different cultures handle these personality types. It’s not surprising that more Americans count themselves extroverts than Chinese – part of it is definitely culture emphasizing ideals. But the other part is genetics, and even though we can learn to cope quite well, her strategies gleaned from interviews and personal experience are thoughtful.
I did feel a little bit at times that she swung a little too far in the direction of introverts – but given this is a book attempting to empower us, I can’t be too surprised at that. The other part I (obviously) did not find useful as a childless woman was the advice for children, and having read it I’m not sure it would have helped me as a kid. But I’ll leave that up to parents to decide – life isn’t easy for shy children, and helping them accept their personalities while giving them the skills to succeed can never be a bad thing to attempt.
Quiet is a worthwhile read for both introverts and extroverts – so the former can feel much more at home in their own skin and so extroverts can learn more about life on the other side of the divide. And if you’re in between, even better.
All book links to external sites are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review from Netgalley.
 As I’m trying to catch up on my reviews from 2011, and now my five six reviews from 2012, I thought I’d better start putting together some mini reviews for those books I can get out of the way quickly! Here are the two short, lighter non-fiction books I read at the end of 2011.
Life Below Stairs, Alison Maloney
Inspired by the success of Downton Abbey, Alison Maloney has composed a brief, easily digestible book about the lives of servants in Edwardian England, around when the period drama is set. The book covers a huge variety of topics and, for me, actually made some of the show’s choices more understandable. For instance, I now understand the purpose and history behind the difference between Miss O’Brien’s clothing and the rest of the maids’, the servant’s ball, and even why Mrs Hughes is a “Mrs” even though she’s not a married woman.
It also highlighted a few of the differences between the show and real life, and the genuine struggles and difficulties that servants had. Life was definitely not as rosy for these folks as it is for the below-stairs servants at Downton. The book has plenty of quotes illustrating this, including one of a poor girl who missed her day off because she was so exhausted from work that she slept through it!
Life Below Stairs also has a few illustrative photos and is a brief overview that will suit fans of the show perfectly, but it’s probably too shallow for anyone who has previously read about the Edwardian period.
 The King’s Speech, Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
Like almost everyone else who has an interest in English history, I saw The King’s Speech in film form last year and absolutely adored it, so it was a no-brainer for me to pick up its written counterpart. Pleasantly, the book contains a few surprises even for those who have seen the film, particularly because it tells the story of Lionel Logue chronologically and includes plenty of background. Naturally, no one could or desires to fit all of this into a biopic framed around a speech, but I delighted in the extra details and in particular the genuine letters and photographs that accompanied the text.
One thing that struck me was that, even though this was less than 100 years ago, the social gap between Logue and George VI was massive. Just reading their letters to one another makes that clear – and also emphasizes how unusual and important their intimacy was. I found the book almost more valuable for that, in my mind, than for the extra details about that particular case. It’s a window into a world that hasn’t been gone for very long, but which is still utterly fascinating.
Highly recommended for those who enjoyed the movie and who are interested in social history.
 William the Conqueror is one of the most well-known figures in English history, and for good reason; with a single battle, he ended the Anglo-Saxon rule of England and changed many aspects of governance, aristocracy, and even language. That’s simplifying things just a bit, but the impact of the Norman invasion on England can’t be overstated. Left behind in the traditional story of great-men-doing-great-things is Queen Matilda, William’s wife and a power in her own right. What influence did she have on William? On the conquest of England? On her children, who went on to rule the country themselves? That is the story Borman aspires to tell in this biography.
I’m not unfamiliar with Matilda; not only have I read about her in fiction, I learned quite a bit about the actual history of her life, too. This book regardless had a lot new to offer and a lot of fodder for thought, especially when it comes to the role of the woman in the medieval world. Borman posits that Matilda’s strong leadership role was preceded and followed by women who expected the same, and that truly there was more of a step backwards after her reign.
For instance, one of Matilda’s namesakes, “Empress” Matilda or Maude, is the prime example. Henry I made her his heir and asked his people to swear loyalty to her – so while he clearly had worries about it, he didn’t pass over her to choose a male heir. Was this the influence of his mother? It’s a fascinating question, and makes the social dynamics that followed Henry I’s death even more intriguing.
Borman also takes a relatively in-depth look at the myths surrounding Matilda and the motivations behind what other people said about her. This is always fascinating stuff for me – I love thinking about how various chroniclers and historians have twisted and portrayed things in ways that suit them best. Matilda suffers this quite a bit and it’s interesting to see Borman’s perspective on which bits are more or less correct. She puts to bed some of the more outlandish tales, like William beating Matilda to a pulp for her to agree to marry him – the world was different then, but probably not THAT different, and Borman’s logic is reasonable.
I also loved that Borman asserted Matilda’s power and influence as both duchess and queen. She witnessed a large number of charters and was personally responsible for ruling in her husband’s absence, something most of us don’t really associate with the Middle Ages. For a piece of chattel, she made and helped with many decisions, and it’s a mark of her influence that she was deeply mourned upon her death. Borman does the usual speculation, pondering what effects Matilda’s “softening” influence may have had while she was alive, as she vividly contrasts William’s rule after her death with those years before.
Overall, Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror is a truly fascinating book for anyone who is interested in female power just before the High Middle Ages. Matilda presents a thoughtful contrast to those who came after; this book would actually fit in wonderfully with Helen Castor’s She-Wolves. Highly recommended.
 Most of us, especially those of us who are literary, have a cozy image of a typical English village in our minds. Mine has definitely been imparted through reading, but has only been strengthened over the time I’ve lived in England. Uneven rows of thatched roof cottages, wide expanses of farmland, the rectory, and maybe even the manor house on the hill – it depends what historical period your mind works best in. Our ideal of the English village is more myth than any kind of reality, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still love them, and that is the contradiction that Wainwright explores in The English Village.
It’s clear from the start that Wainwright loves the ideal of England as much as the rest of us do. The book is broken down into chapters concerning different aspects of the village, from those cottages I mentioned to the festivals that the villagers used to celebrate. The book concludes with a chapter on the potential future of the English village and the changes that have happened recently, namely a revival in village life and a determination to conserve the bits we have left for the future. Each chapter also contains black and white drawings of, usually, buildings mentioned in the text to give us a good idea of what we’re reading about.
At the core this was really a delightful book. I loved the way that Wainwright pulled history into the idyllic vision that so many of us cherish – not to remove the dream, but to add a layer of realism to it. One of my favorite parts was when he mentioned that some cottages which are now valued at over one million pounds used to be houses for the poor. It’s this dichotomy which sums up that contradiction; the now pretty villages had an underside which has mostly moved to the cities, leaving much of the countryside for the wealthy.
The English Village naturally also covers the history of the village and how it has evolved through time, starting with the Norman Conquest and ending with the people who are keeping the dream alive, either through pubs or restoration. The industrial revolution effectively ended the need to live in cottages scattered across the countryside, but that way of life was common throughout our history until that point. The shift was monumental, although also incremental, and given that I am always a person who is fascinated with those fundamental changes, I was hooked by this in particular.
For anyone who has ever imagined having a little house in the countryside – perhaps a timber-framed, plastered house with a thatch roof, as I’ve wished – The English Village is truly the perfect read. And it would make a great Christmas gift, too; if you’re in poking around the shops this weekend looking for last minute presents, look no further.
All external book links are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review from Amazon Vine.
 Shakespeare First Folios are rare objects and highly prized by the libraries and collections which manage to hold them. The First Folio was the very first collection of Shakespeare’s plays ever printed – there were individually printed editions previously but never a large set like this. Eric Rasmussen and his team of researchers have been seeking out First Folios around the world for years. Through their searches and investigations, he presents this collection of stories about individual First Folios, some lost and some found, which are and will continue to fascinate researchers for hundreds of years to come.
This was a very interesting little book about the First Folios. I like Shakespeare well enough but have never really paid that much attention to the enduring physical legacy of his work, although I have been to Stratford-upon-Avon. But I love books and the marginalia that resides in older ones, so there was plenty to like in this book for me, and there certainly would be for anyone who loves physical books.
One thing I found odd, though, was that the book seemed almost as though it had been composed for a magazine or newspaper column previously; for a very short book, there is a lot of repetitiveness, and I thought that the author would have been a bit better assuming people would remember what had happened chapter to chapter. I had a look and couldn’t find anything, but I really wouldn’t be surprised. While there is continuity, it would be easy to pick up in the middle without any problems – perhaps the author expects his readers to dip in and out as they please rather than just read straight through as I did. There is, for instance, a whole lot about the author unable to access the manuscripts in Japanese libraries, and he reintroduces the painting he purchased in a subsequent chapter after he’d already bought it.
Still, this was an enjoyable book on a topic I like very much. Even though many of the Folios that Rasmussen discussed hadn’t actually been seen by him or his team, the stories are fascinating and I enjoyed heading through history with him. Because that’s really what this book is, a trip through history with books in tow. If that sounds like your cup of tea (and I think for many of you reading this, it will), The Shakespeare Thefts is a great choice.
All external book links are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review from Amazon Vine.
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