Review

No One is too Small to Make a Difference

Greta Thunberg As the world currently faces uncertainty in the form of a virus, people are now faced undeniably with the level of impact humans have on the environment which has been highlighted following the need for self-isolation and social distancing. Rivers running cleaner and CO2 emissions down, we’ve proven to ourselves that we can in fact make a difference, it’s just unfortunate that it took an imminent crisis to spell it out.

With the rise of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, school strikes and protests the younger generation are refusing to accept the potential fate that they could be left with. One of the strongest voices comes from Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, at 17-years old she’s already led and participated in several global protests as well as addressing numerous international audiences. The book No One is too Small to Make a Difference documents Thunberg’s public addresses from September 2018 at a climate march in Stockholm to her address at the Houses of Parliament in April 2019.

A small book with a huge message, this collection of Thunberg’s own words reinforces our need for immediate change and drastic action from governments, corporations and individuals. Essentially, the kids are not alright, they’re angry and fed up. The Swedish activist speaks for thousands when she states “you need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. You need to vote for us, your children and grandchildren.” Children are pleading for us to look into the future and to vote

Author Greta Thunberg

for a future that they can thrive in rather than just survive.

As a source and driver of hope, education and urgency this short collection is perfect for those looking to educate themselves on the stance of thousands of people around the world, what they’re fighting for and what needs to be done to ensure the survival of our planet and future generations. This book does the opposite of escapism and thrusts readers into the very real future that may await us if we don’t make drastic changes now.

Being a collection of speeches, many of Thunberg’s key statements are repeated throughout, which you’d expect and which makes this perfect to read across multiple sittings although it may be tempting to read it in one go, each chapter certainly benefits from contemplation before moving onto the next. What readers will be left with is an empowering call to action from this planet’s future. April McIntyre

Days Without End: A Novel

Sebastian Barry Sebastian Barry, born in Dublin in 1955, writes like an angel or some other such higher being. An award-winning novelist, playwright and poet, he has written more than a dozen plays, eight or nine novels and two collections of poetry. Throughout this huge body of work his point of entry or, perhaps, more accurately, his point of departure into the creative mine he explores and excavates so well is almost always a person or half-remembered story or partial memory from his own family history. It is almost as if he listens with his mind’s eye across the ages to an early family member, someone who, perhaps, emigrated from Ireland long ago to live and move across the then world’s stage, bringing only their memories with them for comfort. He listens, hears their story and embellishes and enriches it with his own voice, experience and great gifts of insight as a writer.

Such is his gift and skill he is always authentic, even when he has turned his gaze and thought to longdeparted (or yet to depart!) family members, who are themselves greatly dissimilar. He exquisitely recounts and reveals in The Secret Scripture, for example, the voice and female life experience of Roseanne Mc Nulty

Author Sebastian Barry

– someone who stayed in Ireland and lived a life across the decades of Ireland’s troubled social, economic and political history – whom we find approaching her one hundredth birthday in an Irish psychiatric hospital. With this technique of recovery in a process of uncovering and revealing, he delivers a novel as rich, unsettling and as unforgiving as the novel here under review, which he has created with the same technique.

As a reader, no matter your age, status, or worldwiseness, with the opening pages of Days Without End Sebastian Barry will capture you heart and soul and effortlessly hold you fast until release comes reluctantly with the final sentence. Astonishingly, as a novelist he again achieves this outcome through the creation of a single, powerful, narrative voice which defies any and all prior expectation a reader might have of it. The flawless and highly original voice of this novel is that of a Union soldier in “Mr Lincoln’s” army during the Genocide of the local native populations and the ensuing Civil War between the Northern and Southern states which gave birth to the United States of America that we know today. His wonderful creation is the voice and character of a boy emigrant from Ireland, Thomas Mc Nulty, who at age 17 years joined the Union Army. The novel is substantially Thomas Mc Nulty’s recounting of the totality of his life experiences as a soldier, until the final page when, having earlier settled in Tennessee, he leaves the army aged forty “or thereabouts” in the summer if 1872 and sets out to journey home to Tennessee:

“The whole way sparkles with the beauty of woods and fields. I had wrote I was coming and soon I would be there. That’s how it was. It were only a short stretch of walking down through the pleasing states of Missouri and Tennessee.” (p.300)

Published in 2016, the writing throughout is lyrical with sentences that are simple, short, but deeply moving. The realism of a life that is hard and brutal, in a natural environment also hard and brutal – but

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with a peace and beauty that can shine through to shock and stun – is also rendered faithfully. The words, syntax, speech pattern and interior reflections of this uneducated but wise and thoughtful human being, Thomas Mc Nulty, as he endures great hardship and finds love, rise up from the page such that one can really hear him speak as if directly from across the room. The novel’s themes are huge and Sebastian Barry, through Thomas Mc Nulty’s voice, gives us much to reflect upon: war; peace; truth; justice; love; the power and beauty of nature and the natural world; but above all tolerance and hope during great adversity. The events set forth are truly credible. Nothing that is recounted jars and ne’er a wrong note is struck.

The telling of this essentially autobiographical story by Thomas Mc Nulty is transformative if as a reader you permit the many passages of remarkable brilliance to sink into your consciousness. This novel will not only tell you much about this period of recent history and the landscape in which it was enacted – which truly shaped the world we live in today – it will surprise and tell you much about yourself. Read and wonder at the marvel that is Sebastian Barry and the thing of beauty he has fashioned. Hugh Pollock

The Invention of Nature:

The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science

Andrea Wulf Has any other book ever seized me from the first page in the same way as this book? I doubt it. I came to it knowing nothing about the man except that I presumed the ocean current known as ‘The Humboldt Current’ was named after him, which it is.

In 1869, one hundred years after his birth, he was celebrated in countries all over the world and there are rivers and waterfalls named after him in Tasmania and New Zealand, along with mountain ranges in China, New Zealand and Antarctica. In North America, 4 counties, 13 towns, numerous mountain passes, lakes and rivers are named after him along with nearly 300 plants and 100 animals worldwide, not to mention several minerals. On the moon, there is even an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’! In fact, more places are named

after him than anybody else. I wondered why we in Britain have heard so little of him and discovered that, probably influenced by the anti-Prussian feeling at that time, few of his books were published in English.

His life is absolutely fascinating and Andrea Wulf so beautifully tells the story. It grabbed me from the first word and never let go. I sometimes stopped reading just because I needed to put the book down and reflect on all the amazing and wonderful facts and tales I had just read about.

Humboldt was born in 1769 (the same year as Napoleon) into a wealthy Prussian family, but did not fit the mould expected of him. To please his mother, he enrolled at a prestigious mining academy in Freiburg and completed in 8 months a study programme which normally took 3 years. This led to him being engaged as a mining inspector, and this in itself gave him the opportunity of travelling to evaluate soils, shafts and ore from Brandenburg to Silesia to the Fichtel Mountains and the salt mines in Poland. From this stemmed the enquiring man he became.

He was an explorer, a scientist and a writer and artist. He knew well Simón Bolívar, the liberator and first President of Gran Colombia (what is now Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama), and encouraged him to return to his native country to return it to democracy. He inspired England’s Charles Darwin, who took the complete works of Humboldt with him on the Beagle and described him as the greatest scientific explorer who had ever lived. He was also the first person to warn of global warming. He was a visionary, a thinker far ahead of his time. He had an incredible memory for the smallest detail and could recall years later the shape of a leaf, the colour of soil, a temperature reading or the layering of a rock.

His friendship with the great German writer Goethe lasted all his life and he influenced the likes of America’s Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe and the English Romantics. He was a friend of the German poet Schiller and met American President Thomas Jefferson. They shared many interests but did not agree on slavery to which Humboldt was totally opposed.

During his life he wrote some 50,000 letters, receiving at least twice as many. If all of this makes you feel that this book is dull, a list of achievements, plants, and so on, you could not be more wrong. It is lively, interesting and totally engaging and wonderfully written. There are three chapters towards the end about three significant people greatly influenced by Humboldt. I confess I had heard of none of them but they were all simply fascinating to read about.

George Perkins March particularly took up Humboldt’s warning about humans destroying the earth. He travelled widely and saw the destruction the human race had wrought, and in his book “Man and Nature” wrote of deforestation and destruction along with human avarice which was destroying the earth.

Ernst Haeckel was a zoologist and 25 years old when he heard of Humboldt’s death. He was studying sea urchins at the time but, inspired partly by the life of Humboldt, went on to study minute organisms, called radiolarians. I had never heard of them but the enlarged drawings that Haeckel made are stunning and went on to influence many artists giving Art Nouveau its particular style and influencing architects such as Gaudi and Louis Sullivan, known as the ‘father of skyscrapers’. They also inspired the designer of Binet’s gate at the World Fair in Paris in 1900, and the illustrations of that are lovely.

The third is John Muir who succeeded in creating the great ‘National Parks’ of America with the help and influence of Teddy Roosevelt, who spent 3 days with him in Yosemite.

I heartily recommend this book, a truly wonderful read, well written and inspiring. The distances Humboldt travelled and in particular walked, the mountains he climbed, the unknown areas he explored and the countries he visited and mostly trekked through, South America, North America, Russia, China, and the discomfort he tolerated, all go to make this an amazing tale.

Unsurprisingly, the book won author Andrea Wulf numerous international awards – to add to those she already held. It was the winner of the COSTA Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, picked as Book of the Year fifteen times by writers in a range of national and international publications, a New York Times best seller and a finalist for both a Carnegie Medal and the Kirkus Book Review Prize. What a book this is and what a writer is Andrea Wulf! Moira Gamon