Four more mini reviews

Mini reviews – you know the drill. Let’s do this.

Limbo by Dan Fox

I bought this from Fitzcarraldo’s enviable essay series because it starts with mention of the 25-foot shark that seems to be flying into the roof of a house in Headington, just outside Oxford. I used to live a couple of streets from this shark-house, and it was always fun being on the bus and watching the reactions of people who weren’t expecting it to appear.

From here, Fox looks at different types of limbo – the sort of word that English academics get very animated about, and I daresay the same is true in many disciplines. But it isn’t all philosophising – there’s some great autobiography in here, from his relationship with his often-absent brother to his experience as one of two passengers on an otherwise commercial ship. It’s a very slim volume, but jam-packed with thoughtful ideas and is the sort of book that will doubtless warrant revisiting.

Them by Jon Ronson

I love Ronson’s funny and courageously researched books into strange worlds – from bizarre FBI techniques to psychopaths to, my favourite, his exploration of mob justice on social media in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. This earlier book, Them, looks at many different types of extremists – including those who actively hate Ronson for being Jewish. Central to the book is the conspiracy theory that all powerful people in the world meet together in secret. Which it seems… they might do.

It’s as informative, odd, and enjoyable as ever. My only qualm is that Ronson surely can’t be quite as nonchalant and blasé in all these extraordinary, often dangerous, situations as he seems to be? And he finds the humour in any event or person – I think the idea is showing how ridiculously normal issues still face extremist groups, like not being able to organise an event properly. But sometimes I wish he had been a little less objective. Some of the people he meets are truly determined to harm many other people, and I’m not sure I want to laugh at that.

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks

It’s no secret that I love Oliver Sacks – and this is probably his most famous book after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It covers a group of patients who survived the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the ’20s, but had post-encephalitic illnesses to various degrees of severity. Some were hardly able to move, while others had severe speech restrictions, and there is a huge range of other symptoms. Sacks is head of a trial of a new drug L-DOPA – and, again, the range of reactions is dizzying. Some recover immediately but then get worse. Others develop a whole new series of symptoms affecting their movement, speech, and fundamental character. It is all extraordinary, and must have been difficult to know how to organise it. Sacks does it by patient, writing about their lives before the illness, as he always does – seeing them as people, not medical cases.

In this early book, Sacks has yet to develop the tone for the layman – sentences like ‘She appeared to have a bilateral nuclear and internuclear ophthalmoplegia’ meant nothing to me – and Awakenings hovers somewhere between scientific paper and accessible account. The stories of many of these patients pop up elsewhere, such as in his autobiography, and he has found the tone then. Structurally, by going patient-by-patient, Sacks hasn’t quite nailed the idea of an overarching arc – and I don’t think I’d recommend Awakenings to Sacks newbies. But, yes, truth certainly is stranger than fiction in this one.

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

If you know any internet memes, chances are you’ve seen the ‘Clean ALL the things!’ image that Brosh came up with on her blog ‘Hyperbole and a Half’. She was very big about a decade ago, and wrote a great graphic book under the same name as her blog. Her pictures are done in Paint or something like that, deliberately crude but with deceptive amounts of time put into getting the right expressions etc.

Her earlier book was mostly very funny, and Solutions and Other Problems has a lot of that same observational, slightly surreal, humour. I laughed a lot when she wrote about her dogs. But life has certainly been tough to Brosh since her first book. We are also given access to her debilitating depression, the death of her sister and her reflections on their strained relationship, and more. It all holds together really well, and I’m so glad Brosh is back writing.