Taco, by Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado
I received a copy of this from the publisher, Bloomsbury, at no cost. It’s out now.
I love everything about the Object Lessons series. Basically I’ll read every single book, no matter the subject matter. In this case, the subject matter is a bonus: I am a massive fan of food history, and food as social commentary. The taco works beautifully for that.
I am Australian, which means I have little knowledge of “the taco” as cultural object. My first experience was your classic Old El Paso hard shell, and I was well an adult before I discovered that this was not the “authentic” way to eat them – and having said that, Sanchez Prado’s discussion about the question of authenticity is a thing of absolute beauty. I knew that there was controversy within the US about Mexican food, because racism; I knew that “Mexican food” is a multifaceted thing. Sanchez Prado brings all of this to light in a rigorous and readable way – within the under-150-pages context of an Object Lessons book. He provides an extensive reading list, too, for those who want to go further.
This is a fabulous celebration of what was once street food, poor food, and has now suffered “elevation” and popularisation and has become symbolic of much, much more than some food wrapped in some other food. It’s a great introduction to a lot of issues. Definitely one for the food nerd in your life.
Fearless Beatrice Faust
I very rarely read biographies of modern people. Faust only died in 2019, so that’s VERY modern by my standards. But I’ve been interested in how people approach modern biographies, for a project, and so this one was recommended. Having enjoyed Brett’s “From Compulsory Voting to Democracy Sausage,” I was fairly sure I’d enjoy her style, so this seemed like a good option.
Turns out, Faust was an amazing woman. Would I always have agreed with her? Oh no. Would I probably have found her abrasive to work with on a committee? Oh yes. Would I nonetheless have loved to be a neighbour, occasionally going over for coffee and hanging out? For sure.
Faust had a difficult upbringing: her mother dies from childbirth complications, her father is distant, her eventual stepmother unpleasant, and Faust herself is a sickly child (and continues to have multiple chronic conditions for most of her life, which are an enormously complicating factor for her). Yet she is clearly highly intelligent; she gets into Mac.Rob, the select-entry Melbourne girls’ school, and then Melbourne University to do an honours degree in Arts, and eventually an MA. Over her lifetime she writes many tens of thousands of words, and basically becomes a public intellectual – but not an academic, mostly because of misogyny.
Faust was extremely open about her life: her sexuality and sexual experiences, her abortions, her accidental addiction to benzos – all were fuel for public talks, articles, government submissions, and the many letters she wrote to friends.
She was also the founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, a key member of the Abortion Law Reform League, and various other women-focused campaigns. Her relationship with “women’s lib” and some aspects of feminism were fraught – she’s just that bit older than many of the agitators of the early 70s – and she definitely had some views that 1970s feminists had a problem with. In particular, some of the ways she talked about pronography, and – even more problematically – her apparent defence of some paedophiles were very troubling. Brett goes into these topics in great depth, sympathetic to Faust in that she tries to understand her views as well as possible, and present them fairly, but not so sympathetic that Faust gets a pass when she is saying unwholesome things.
Brett’s overall style is intriguing. She was approached by Faust’s friends, after she died, saying that she would be a good subject – and Brett said yes for many reasons, including the personal connection (living in Melbourne, some of the same haunts). Brett is not absent from the text, and I appreciated this aspect a lot. That’s not to say that Brett makes it all about her. I mean that Brett will mention when Faust’s reasoning is ambiguous, or when she got something wrong; and in dealing with some really hard topics – like her views on paedophilia – Brett wrestles with why Faust may have thought the way she did, and also calls her out for views that are pretty clearly inappropriate by today’s standards. Brett insightfully considers the question of whether Faust would be considered a TERF today, because she believed that biology was a significant part of a person’s identity; she concludes that it would be easy to say yes, but that Faust’s view is more nuanced than many TERFs, so perhaps not (Faust also didn’t seem to have a problem with a trans woman she spent some time with).
Beatrice Faust absolutely deserved to have a biography written about her. I’m glad Judith Brett was able to do so.
Frostbite, by Nicola Twilley
I came to this book because I am a fan of the podcast Gastropod, and Twilley is one of the hosts. She’s an immensely engaging host there, and she’s also an immensely engaging author. Her interest in and passion for “food through the lens of science and history” (the podcast’s tagline) comes through here: the history, present, and future of refrigeration and its connection to food is told thoughtfully, clearly, and with honest acknowledgement of the issues as well as the benefits.
One of the things I hadn’t really expected, but should have given the podcast, is just how much time Twilley spent actually experiencing the things that she discusses. She works some shifts in cold storage warehouses! She visits farms and factories! She goes to China and Rwanda as well as all over the US! And she has clearly talked to A LOT of people about all of the issues.
A fairly big focus of the book is the development of artificial refrigeration for food: the reasons for its necessity and the various people who were involved in trying to do so, the things they tried and how often they failed. I had no idea that people thought it would be ear impossible, but Twilley lays out the reasons for why it was so very hard and honestly I ended up surprised that it happened at all.
The bit that I found quite distressing was the reality of how much space is used for cold storage, and its environmental impact. But Twilley also points out how important refrigeration can be for things like reducing food wastage – one of the things I like about her reporting is that it’s not just two-sides-ing for the sake of it, but is looking at the issues very clearly and thoughtfully.
It’s a great book. Definitely one for people who are interested in how processes that we absolutely take for granted actually work.
(One thing to note, for those of us not in the USA: the book does use Fahrenheit throughout, which meant for me that I have no idea what the temperatures she’s referring to actually feel like.)
Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out in November.
Absolutely fantastic biography, and also introduction to the entire period.
I love a biography that (re-)examines a woman in her context. Johnson is clear that she’s not the first to write a biography of Margaret Beaufort, but that one of the new things she’s doing is putting her very much in the context of women – the women she interacts with over her life: her mother and half-sisters, mothers-in-law and friends and servants and rivals, daughter-in-law and granddaughters. This gives a fantastic insight into what’s going on for noblewomen at this time in England, Wales, and even Scotland.
Of course, an enormous amount of the book is about Margaret’s interactions with men, too: husbands, mostly, but then eventually her son, as well as various half-brothers and stepchildren, not to mention cousins. My goodness, the cousins: when you’re a noble with a long lineage, you are related to EVERYONE of any importance. And, apparently, you knew them, or could at least call on them in times of need / just for the heck of it. Which really puts the War of the Roses in context, because it’s all about brothers and cousins fighting amongst themselves and devastating the countryside in the process.
Margaret Beaufort had a remarkable life. Terrible, at some points – pregnant and widowed at 13 – but also long, with many healthy and loving relationships (as far as we can tell), and eventually a son and then grandson on the throne. Not a terrible ending, one suspects. Lauren Johnson does an excellent job of making Margaret as human and relatable as feasible, while still reminding us that her life 500 years ago was very, very different from what we experience today. She does a very good job of trying to make the names easy to process (TOO MANY HENRYS and JOHNS), and the politicking easy (ish) to follow. This is a really great book.
The Far Edges of the Known World
This book is right up my alley. Really old stuff, questioning received wisdom, drawing together both evidence that has been known for ages and new discoveries via archaeology… and engagingly written as well. I enjoyed it immensely.
Rees starts with the poet Ovid, who for some unknown reason got exiled by that Great Bastion of Reason, Octavian Who Got Himself Called Augustus (“Illustrious One”). Basically for the rest of his life – as far as we can tell – Ovid spent his time complaining and petitioning to be allowed back to the Centre Of Life and Light, Rome. Now, firstly this does give us David Malouf’s quite fabulous An Imaginary Life, so that’s a good thing. But it also deeply colours how subsequent historians have thought about “the edges” – those bits where if there’s a bright centre to the universe, you’re in the town that it’s farthest from. And as Owen Rees shows, this is just not a fair way of characterising “the edges” at all. Not least because “edges” implies a centre, and (the centre of a galaxy being a real thing notwithstanding), the idea that there is a “centre” to “civilisation” brings up SO MANY QUESTIONS.
The first section is about pre-history – which is a concept that Rees takes pains to explore as a concept – and it looks at Lake Turkana in Kenya (some of the earliest human occupation), the Great Cataract in Sudan, and Megiddo in Israel. This section was absolutely enchanting and sets up a lot of the ideas followed in the rest of the book: contact between different areas, the sorts of evidence we can use, and so on.
Section 2 looks at the Greek world, and Section 3 looks at the Roman. So we get the expected ‘edges’: ancient towns in (what is now) Ukraine, Egypt, France, and England, Morocco, and Egypt. This was the bit that was most familiar to me – because I know about these empires – and which was therefore the most fascinating, because it complicated all of that so fantastically. The cross-fertilisation between the hegemonic empire and the ‘barbarians’ on the border, what we can figure out of how people interacted: I LOVE IT.
Finally, the last section is ‘Beyond the Classical World’ – the book is really aiming at a specifically English, maybe American, audience, those people who are very firmly in the “Greece and Rome are THE ancient areas and everywhere else is weird.” I suspect folks who come from a perspective that says India and China were really important – let alone other civilisations – will find some of the sentences a bit surprising, maybe borderline patronising, because there’s a little bit of “these other civilisations also existed!” I suspect this does not actually reflect Rees’ own perspective, but the expected audience. ANYWAY, this section looks at ancient towns in Ukraine, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Ethiopia and Eritrea. This section was really cool and MUCH more unknown for me.
I guess the short version is “I learned a lot and enjoyed doing it.”
Fulvia: The Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome
THIS BOOK.
Argh, this book. I have been waiting to get my hands on this book for… I dunno, a year or something? And now I have read it and it was wonderful.
I have enjoyed Jane Draycott’s work since reading Cleopatra’s Daughter: she has a wonderfully engaging style, she makes it clear when she’s making educated guesses but doesn’t shy away from them, and she’s determined to excavate interesting women out of either being completely ignored (Cleopatra Selene), or mostly ignored except when they’re excoriated (Fulvia).
Had I completely forgotten that Fulvia was married to Marc Antony? Uh, oops. I KNEW there was another reason that I was dead keen on learning more about her.
So little is known about Fulvia as a person that Draycott has to spend quite a lot of time going over what is known about OTHER Roman women in order to a) have a stab at discussing what most of Fulvia’s life was like, and b) putting her in context for both why some of the things she did were so unusual, and why some of the things she did were NOT unusual but still got maligned. While I already knew a lot of these things it was still great to see it all put together like this, and particularly in conversation with the life of one particular woman – for someone coming to the book with zero knowledge of Rome, I think it would be pretty accessible. The main thing that isn’t all that accessible, and which there is no getting away from, is the names. My goodness, Romans, could you not have had more imagination in your nomenclature? Gets me every single time.
Anyway. This book is a delight. It’s the best sort of revisionist history: not just accepting what ancient sources say, but examining their reasons for doing so; adding in the archeological evidence, as well as other source material; and bringing a trained feminist idea to persuasively make the case for how misogyny has worked over the centuries to write Fulvia’s story.
Look, it’s just really good. Highly recommended for anyone interested in late Republican Rome, and/or women’s history in general.
Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction
Available to buy from The University of the Philippines Press.
This is another book sent to me by the wonderful Charles Tan, who knows that I have an abiding interest in non-fiction about science fiction and fantasy…
I love that this book exists. The Philippines as a modern nation has such a fascinating (note: not necessarily a positive term!) and tumultuous modern history – the various waves of colonisation and everything that goes with them – that to begin unpicking influence and purpose and consequence is a hard thing. What I hadn’t realised and should have is that, as with so many groups (thank you, Joanna Russ and How To Suppress Women’s Writing, for always making me think about this), modern Filipino authors may not necessarily know all of the history of speculative fiction in their country, for one reason or another.
So the historian and SFF fan in me is both fascinated and thankful for the editors and authors of this book: the first half, “Reading Philippine Speculative Fiction,” is literally tracing some of the histories and places where it has developed and thrived. Two chapters in this section are in Tagalog, so I can’t speak to what they’re about; but the others were really fascinating, especially that on Komiks and the way Filipino authors have used external and local influences to create stories.
I will admit that I only flicked through the second half of the book: I don’t write fiction, so “Writing Philippine Speculative Fiction” is not for me. I do love that Emil Francis M. Flores wrote on “First World Dreams, Third World Realities: Technology and Science Fiction in the Philippines,” since this conjunction is one that I think has enormous potential for authors to explore.
This is a great book. Props to the University of the Philippines for publishing it.
Black Convicts, Santilla Chingaipe
I came across this book because I heard Chingaipe at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. She was personally compelling, and the story she told of learning about the Black convicts who came to the east coast of Australia over the first few decades of “white” settlement was intriguing. So I picked it up, and have finally got around to reading it. To be honest I was putting it off because I knew it was going to have some harrowing bits – and I was right – although I also expected it to be gripping, and rewarding. On those counts it was more than I expected, because Chingaipe is an excellent author.
Chingaipe is doing two things here. On the one hand, she is writing about the Black people who were brought, or in a couple of instances came under their own steam, to the country we now call Australia (which wasn’t a country during this period and wasn’t always known as Australia). Often she’s talking about people whose names have never been mentioned in histories before, which is amazing in its own right. Some of these people were part of the standard “convict comes to Australia” story that tends to be discussed – do some minor crime in England, get sent to the colony for 7 or 14 years, live life here after. Many of the others, though, did their “crime” (a category explored extensively) in one of Britain’s other colonies – various sites in the Caribbean, or Mauritius, for instance – who then got shipped to England and then to these shores. Which I had no idea about.
On the other hand, she is also exploring the links between slavery, its systems and language and attitudes, and the convict system. What she points out are some things that I had previously considered, especially with the language, but a whole bunch of things that I was completely unaware of. She makes a compelling case for the convict system in Australia owing a great deal to the structures developed for and around slavery in North Americas and the Caribbean by the British. Which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, when it’s laid out… but that’s often the way with a history like this.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about Chingaipe’s style is her presence within the book. I have noticed this happening more frequently in history books, especially with very deliberately and self-consciously political books: a refusal to pretend that the historian is objective, or even absent from the story they’re telling. So we get the story of Chingaipe visiting Hobart and Barbados, Zooming with historians around the world, her own emotional reaction to various stories. Far from detracting from the history, as would have been suggested decades ago (and probably still is by some today), this highlights the importance of the topic being discussed, and the fact that history is not/never is “past.”
I really think that anyone interested in Australian history, and probably also African diaspora history, would benefit from reading this.
Incorrigible Optimist: Gareth Evans’ Political Memoir
Look. I’m a history teacher, and a cynic. I understand the point of a political memoir. So on the one hand, reading this was amusing because for all the self-deprecating humour and the admission of bad decisions and poor choices, it’s still an exercise in ego to write memoir.
And on the other hand: I just want more politicians to be like this. To be passionate about things that will actually make a positive difference. To be self-aware. To be willing to make hard, necessary decisions. I was a child of the 80s and 90s – at the back of my mind, “the Australian government” is Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and, yes, Gareth Evans.
I don’t read modern biographies, as a rule, and I really don’t read autobiographies. They hold zero fascination for me. I can probably remember every 20th century biography I’ve read: the Dirk Bogarde one my mother gave me (I went through a serious Bogarde phase), and Julie Phillips’ Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr one; ones about Vida Goldstein and Emmeline Pankhurst; and one about Alexander Kerensky. Oh and Gertrude Bell! That’s literally the list – and given the number I’ve read about people who died before 1800 (and it’s only that late because of the French Revolution – oh Danton, you’ll always live in my heart), six is nothing. But now we can add this to the list, which I read for Reasons that may eventually become clear (not in this review).
This is, of course, not really an autobiography. It’s a political memoir – I think Evan mentions his wife twice? maybe doesn’t mention his kids at all? – so there’s no discussion, really, of anything outside of what has shaped his attitude to policies and ideas. It’s also not just focused on himself acting, but also on his ideas. There is an entire section where he’s outlining the pillars of the “responsibility to protect” concept that I had no idea about, but which he was fundamental in drawing up for the international community; sections where he talks about how universities (and especially chancellors) should function, why nuclear weapons should be utterly eliminated, the importance of international cooperation… this is not just a memoir: it’s a manifesto. Honestly, it’s a bit swoon-worthy.
Realise when this was published, though, and it feels like a dream of a half-forgotten world. Because it was mid-2017. Trump was just elected for the first time; Brexit was relatively new. Dreadful things had happened in Syria and Libya, and Russia was making its first forays around Ukraine. Scotty wasn’t even being joked about as PM. So when Evans discusses his hope that Trump might eventually “submit to adult supervision;” when he talks about his hope that “responsibility to protect” might be a real factor in international discussions when populations are at risk of war crimes and genocide… well. There’s a part of me that wishes I could go back to that time, and live it again, knowing how good it was.
This book probably doesn’t have that much appeal beyond Australia’s borders – unless you want to just read it for the foreign policy aspect, and for Evans’ involvement with Crisis Group and various UN and regional Asian events, all of which are quite fascinating. But if you’re like me – with a vague interest in Australian and international politics, and especially with a memory of those Labor glory days – this may well be of interest.
Francis of Assisi
I came to this book because I am friends with the translator. This does not guarantee that I was going to love it.
I am not Catholic. I have zero fascination with the idea of ‘saints’ in and of themselves; my primary interest is in how the women and men who get that title existed in their world. I also tend to have more interest in those who were regarded in some way as odd or outsiders in their time, or who lived in interesting places and times. So Francis is interesting, and also has the added dimension of being amongst the most well-known of all the Catholic saints. So I was fascinated to learn about this book being translated from the German. Having read it, I’m very glad it has been.
I was particularly fascinated by the book as an historian because Leppin spends a great deal of time reflecting on the primary sources available about Francis’ life: both the paucity of sources in general, and the intensely problematic nature of what does exist. Because Francis was canonised so quickly, and because his order already existed when he died – there are so many reasons to want to portray Francis in very particular ways, and reading through/around those to get to a ‘real’ Francis is always going to be challenging. So I deeply appreciated Leppin’s honesty around that, and his acknowledgement that ‘the truth’ is always going to be a challenge.
Nonetheless, I think Leppin does a good job of excavating Francis’ life, and presenting what we can reasonably understand about the man. I appreciated that Leppin isn’t interested in yet more hagiography, but in actually understanding a person – who wasn’t perfect, and made some odd choices, and whose heart we can’t fully understand, but who was nonetheless making some radical choices for his time.
And of course I need to mention the translation: and as with the best translations, you wouldn’t know that this is translated. It just… reads like a book. I can only imagine just how much work went into choosing the right words to both capture Leppin’s meaning and make the book itself work.
So, for those interested in Francis as a human, and how the Catholic church worked in the 13th century, this is a great book.
Randomly Yours, Alex 