Non-fiction

Sinking feelings

Jo Littler, PD Smith and Vera Rule on Quicksands: A Memoir | We Are Iran | Do Animals Think? | Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Chang | The Collapse of Globalism

Quicksands: A Memoir, by Sybille Bedford (Penguin, £8.99)

The novelist Sybille Bedford had a nomadic life, growing up primarily in Germany, England and France. Her childhood experiences included schlepping around Italy with her morphine-addicted mother; being educated in France by a father whose curriculum mainly consisted of wine-tasting; and a spell in the West Midlands experiencing the bohemia of Marmite sandwiches. As an adult, she hung out with Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf and began, sporadically, to publish novels. When the family money was confiscated by the Nazis she became dependent on the kindnesses of others. Quicksands details her relationships to these friends, and to writing - which, "when it follows its own, often unlooked for, commands, is a queer and puzzling business". Sifting through the archaeology of her everyday life, Bedford creates fragmented anecdotes that somehow produce a convincingly open whole. Her descriptions are often very beautiful; looking at the sky, she writes of how the concept of a book came to her, "abstract, ecstatic, eloquent though speechless: an apparition clear and complex moving unseen within myself".
Jo Littler

We Are Iran, by Nasrin Alavi (Portobello, £9.99)

This captivating study of contemporary Iran is illustrated by a wide range of extracts from the weblogs rapidly being constructed by its citizens. For, if illicit conversations in Iran have often taken place inside communal taxis, they are now increasingly happening in cyberspace; computer use is expanding so rapidly that there are currently more blogs in Farsi than in Chinese or Spanish. Such online postings provide an outlet for expressions banned by the clerical elite which dominates the country and parliament. Alavi uses the range of tones and feeling that pour through the electronic ether to enliven this excellent "people's history" of the country. Organised around themes such as gender, religion and war, she focuses in particular on the younger "rebellious generation" (70% of the population are under 30). At the same time, the book is historically sharp, highlighting how the US-UK coup that crushed the democratically elected government of the 1950s sowed the seeds of militant Islamic anti-Americanism as well as a wider "nation of steadfast revolutionaries". An engaging and inventive book that deserves a wide audience.
JL

Do Animals Think? by Clive DL Wynne (Princeton, £11.95)

Clive Wynne hails from the Isle of Wight, the unlikely setting for a bombing campaign waged by animal rights activist Barry Horne in 1994. Wynne uses this misguided attempt to defend animals (although not naked apes) as the point of departure for an intelligent and balanced discussion of our attitudes towards other species and what (if anything) animals think. In spite of philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous claim that it is impossible to know what it is like to be a bat, Wynne explores the "excitingly alien" perceptual worlds of bats, honeybees, pigeons, and dolphins, as well as assessing the evidence for the existence of supposedly human faculties - reasoning, language, and mind-reading - in other species. Despite headline-grabbing claims about chatty chimps and Delphic dolphins, his conclusion is that there is a "pretty big difference" between human and animal minds: "It's not their like-us-ness that makes animals important: it's their not-like-us-ness." Wynne succeeds superbly in evoking the otherness of the nonhuman perspective. A refreshingly sceptical and pugnacious investigation.
PD Smith

Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change, by Bob Seidensticker (Berrett-Koehler, £14.99)

"Prediction is very difficult," said Niels Bohr, "especially about the future." As a "digital hardware designer" and software "architect", Bob Seidensticker has always been "an energetic cheerleader for technology". But, he says, today "the popular perception of modern technology is inflated and out of step with reality". The purpose of his book is to explode some hi-tech myths and to "vaccinate" us against the hype about the supposedly exponential rate of technology change: "Tomorrow will look more like today than most predictions would lead us to believe." Seidensticker argues that we are all victims of "birthday present syndrome", constantly chasing the latest gadgets and believing that they will solve all our problems. He echoes the words of a former president of the American Association of University Professors: "Understanding ourselves and feeling for others does not come with a software upgrade." Among the many dud predictions is this gem from a captain of industry in 1955: "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be ready within 10 years." Recommended reading for politicians and planners dazzled by technology.
PDS

The Collapse of Globalism, by John Ralston Saul (Atlantic, £9.99)

"Collapse" is a melodramatic word for what Saul itemises patiently and quietly - the present realisation that economics cannot be a religion no matter how devout its paid priesthood; that nation states have not withered despite megacorps; that the market does not a society make. And yes, there is such a thing as society. There had better be, or down we all tumble into Hobbesian chaos. Saul analyses what happened to Malaysia and New Zealand, heretic countries that renounced the neo-liberal faith, but have not yet been consumed by the threatened flames of bankruptcy and depression; and repeatedly returns to the idea that governmental responsibility constitutes true freedom - the power of what he calls "positive nationalism". Sometimes his tangential preoccupations soften the tone too much, but often they remind you that vast, impersonal economic forces are just the massive aggregate of millions of very personal preoccupations. There's a wonderful vignette of the poisoned Viktor Yuschenko's arrival at an EU dinner in Cracow from out of a snowstorm. Economics, like history, is people.
Vera Rule

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