Month: June 2024

Deep Water: The World in the Ocean is the brilliant writer James Bradley’s fascination with oceans yoked to a deep need to turn the world around toward a carbon-free future. Comprehensively covering so many aspects of the seas, from the history of marine life, to the degradations of fishing, to , to the global shipping sector, to the likely demise of beautiful, essential coral reefs, and on and on, Deep Water is compelling mix of exposition and personal experience and reportage. Throughout, Bradley writes with lyrical, precise surety. One of the more fascinating chapters chronicles the fascinating, multi-layered history of the practice and pastime and sport of swimming. Bradley concludes that chapter with a “meditation” including: “When we swim our bodies become part of the tidal flow and movement of water, the great pulse of the planet’s systems, the act of giving ourselves over to their rhythms a form of communion, of embodied connectedness.” Lovely stuff indeed. I was fascinated by his coverage of the nightly “diel” vertical migration (up then down) of some 10 billion tonnes of sea life around the globe. The chapter on fish consciousness /intelligence/self-awareness reads like a fever dream of recognition: Bradley’s exploration of the umwelt/world (a term I learnt from Ed Yong’s An Immense World) is revelatory. And here he is on the type of shoreline familiar to all Australians: ”Beaches are sites of encounter, where sea meets land and land meets sea, each altering the other as the energy of the ocean is released.” Deep Water is wonderful and essential.

In The Berry Pickers, a solid if undistinguished novel by Amanda Peters, a six-year-old Mi’kmaq boy, helping pick berries in the 60s in Maine, as part of an extended family crew of regular casual workers from Nova Scotia, fails to notice when his younger sister disappears. Riven by guilt for the rest of his life, he becomes a hothead drifter. In the meantime, a young girl grows up in a well-to-do family nearby, questioning her memories and her identity within her family while her unhappy parents shroud her with protectiveness. This is a tale of dispossession and indigenous suffering, and the author is a writer of solid skills, drawing the two lives as the years pass by. The tale carries some weight but the plot signals itself from the very beginning and never deigns to offer any intrigue or sharpness. The start becomes the end, with no climax, and I found myself fretting with disbelief during the read. If you have a fascination for indigenous American stories, The Berry Pickers might well resonate, but my enjoyment was blunted by narrative tedium.

Crackerjack sci-fi author Frank Kennedy is on a roll with his rapid-fire Farewell Amity Station trilogy. The second book, Shadow Gambit, continues the story of Trevor Stallion, a senior security officer on a huge space world, Amity Station. After solving the existential threat of a deadly terrorist group in the first book, now he finds himself targeted by a shadowy nemesis who threatens him, his world, and his family. In the meantime, the tale is broadened by following his brother, Connor, now an elite space trooper, who encounters his own existential dilemma and potentially places him on a collision course with Trevor. The author’s world-building and plotting are, as always, fully in control, and the writing is assured and entertaining. Shadow Gambit is an absorbing, fascinating evening’s read.

Sebastian Junger is a brilliant writer, penning prose that flows with rhythm, that is thick with telling detail, and that is driven by flawless plotting. I haven’t been drawn to his more military works but In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife immediately appealed to this existential worry wart. Scarcely longer than a novella, the book relates the author’s tussling with mortality following a near fatal medical emergency. As ever, Junger beguiles: listen to this: “Eventually, children start providing reassurance to their parents rather than the other way around…”The first two thirds, the author reporting (almost as if in a war zone) his own experience juxtaposed with flashbacks of early reckoning with sickness and death, is a sweet read, and that alone is basis for recommending the book. If the final third, in which he explores, with honesty and obsessiveness, a growing conviction that his experience signalled the truth of some form of cosmic afterlife … if that climax frustrates a reader (as it did me), his treatment leaves plenty of room for an interesting debate. In My Time of Dying seems, after the read, a superbly written, heartfelt, if somehow odd, book unlike any I have read this year.

Petulance is the consequence of arrogance, something I brought to my reading of Day, the eighth novel by Michael Cunningham. Exasperated by films, for example, that seem to lack any appreciation for Modern Scriptwriting 101, I can find myself muttering, “But nothing happens…” This was the exact phrase in mind halfway through Day, a deceptively “simple” novel about seven characters: Robbie, an unachieving teacher living in the Brooklyn attic of his sister Isabel and filling out the imaginary life of his Instagram avatar Wolfe; Isabel, professional but unsatisfied, unhappy with marriage; Dan, her husband, a handsome ex-minor-rock star; Nathan, their sensitive ten-year-old son; Violet, their imaginative five-year-old daughter; an artist brother and his wife. We spend time in their various heads on April 5, 2019, then amidst pandemic lockdown on April 5, 2020; and finally in post-pandemic, changed circumstances on April 5, 2021. Cunningham’s writing is almost conversationally immersive, deep inside the characters’ chattering minds. Conventional plot action is limited, hence my readerly griping midway through the book. Yet, in the second half, something magical occurred: I found myself “knowing” the characters in a way that suggests I’ll remember them, in quite some detail, long after more dramatic novels fade from memory. By the time of the minor climax, I was admiring the author’s consummate characterization skills and stagehand plotting, and, more importantly, much moved. Day, I realized, is a welcome book reminding us of the wondrous variety in the human race. Recommended.

An academic in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship, Ethan Mollick has written one of the few AI books in 2024 that could change my life. Engaging fully with all the current and future uncertainties around the current incarnation of AI, namely LLMs such as Chat-GPT, Gemini, and Claude 3, Mollick adopts an approach that at first appears provocative but quickly seems essential. Namely, whether you approve or decry the LLMs, whether you welcome them or quake from them, the only thoughtful approach is to use them and come to know them. And in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Mollick vigorously espouses diving in and treating them as if they are human interns, flawed but useful if employed sagely. In the words of his blurb, we should “engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach.” Wow! The scales fell off my eyes. Mollick is a wonderful writer on the subject, setting matters out clearly, explaining his approach step by step (with numerous practical examples), and writing in an engaging manner. Some of the more enticing suggestions felt rather bold when reading them but also thrilling. For example, he uses three different “characters,” called Ozymandias, Mnemosyne, and Steve to help edit written material. For such a weighty idea, Co-Intelligence is not of doorstop size, and a couple of evenings of reading might, as it did for me, radicalise your approach to this new, weird technology.

A perky, opinionated, morally upright memoir about a quarter century of tech journalism in America, Kara Swisher’s Burn Book might be for you, as it was for me, a welcome, oblique retrospective on a tumultuous period of industrial and political history. One of the key journalists in this field (although I never noticed her, this does not surprise me, I paid little attention to the daily fray), she wrote for most major mastheads and then formed her own conference and news company. A glance at the front cover, showing a steely face behind reflective sunglasses (filled in with flames, giving you a sense of her overall message), reveals that the reader is in good hands throughout: the narrative control is firm and clear, the style is brisk or combustive, depending on her mood, and the tone is distinctive. In other words, this book is a pleasure to read. It seems Swisher knew and knows everyone in Silicon Valley; I was especially fascinated by her close-up portrayals of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. The arc she delineates from the 90s to now is one of moral decline amongst the tech billionaires and at the end, Swisher is a robust advocate of what we all want, which is societal control, via regulation, of one of the central elements of our lives. Neither a polemic nor a self-hagiography, Burn Book is a hoot to read and hugely valuable.