The Bandaged Hand

It's that time of the year where I get to plug on of my own books.  

'The Bandaged Hand' is a collection of poems written over a five year period, dedicated to the NHS for their helping me to cope with my bi-polar.  It is as Melanie Branton says 'eclectic' as it digs deep into life and finds treasures.  

As part of the private pleasure of writing it is also a pleasure to be sharing it publicly to others who may want to read my sustained efforts of writing.  

For those who read this blog I want to thank you for showing an interest as it has helped me keep on with my passion and curiosity of reading and writing.

There is more to come...

'A hero of mine' -David Oakwood

'There is courage and persistence in these words'-Richard Lawson

'His off-kilter imaginative perspective will surprise and delight'- Melanie Branton

 

 The Bandaged Hand by Alistair David Todd | 9781839455056 (feedaread.com)

'Physics of the Future' by Michio Kaku

For those that have worries about the future fear no more for Michio Kaku in 'Physics of the Future' says that it's going to be unrecognisably amazing. How amazing? Well by the end of this century we will 'control computers directly with our minds', we'll have emotional robots, designer children, programmable matter and increased risk of climate change. Pretty cool, yeah?

There will be those of us (me included) that will find reading this book, written almost ten years ago, with a straight face a little difficult. Kaku is the asbestos optimist, nothing seems to throw him off with how great technology will make our lives. And I'll grant him that it does seem to create a more humane world. 

 But what about cultural, historical and political forces that might get in the way? Will it just increase inequality? Will there be a Roussean backlash with people wishing to return to a simpler 'state of nature'? What if Yuval Noah Harari is right and our governments hack our bio-systems? What if Capitalism eats the world? All this will have a destabilising effect, yet it feels more and more these days that nothing is truly stable so if we can have electronic wallpaper to keep moral up than so more the better.

I am reminded of the game 'Deus Ex' where you played a character in between two camps of people. Those who have no technological implants and those who are fully cyborg. Is it possible that we could see a split between two different attitudes of mind? Mentioned in the book are the Islamic extremist who really don't want modern technology, but the people who do embrace technology in it's fullest will be the people who will be like gods to those who have nothing to do with it.

Kaku isn't just blue-sky thinking as his book is based on over three hundred conversations with leading scientists so it could become a very accurate prophesy if we survive as a species long enough to find out.

It also reminds me of a quote from a climate scientist who said that they thought the problems of climate change was green house gas, rising sea level and erosion of topsoil when really they found that the real problems were greed, apathy, selfishness and lack of compassion. And this really gets to the nub of the problem for me. I can communicate with the whole world from the vicinity of my living room and watch 80s Egyptian films whenever I like but it doesn't solve the fundamental emotional problems I have.

Or put it another way; there's no technological fix for the soul. Of course behaviour is entirely dictated to by economics and environment and by changing these things different behaviours are produced. It could be said that having TV programmes that document the cultures of other countries has given us a global consciousness the like we have never experienced. 

 For me I have a workable knowledge of Japanese society from watching programmes about it. It's partly the reason why I eat noodles every day because I want to emulate aspects of that culture that I like. And so in this way there is an argument that technology is making us more tolerant, peaceable and even kind.

Then there is the argument that it allows total nutters and highly dangerous people to connect and form increasingly powerful groups that could destabilise all the scientific knowledge needed to create this beautifully painted picture of the future.

But hark! Kaku has thought about this and says: 'There is so much noise on the Internet, with would be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.' It's going to take a while for that to happen I fear but if that is true then hopefully I could make a killing in the future.

And there is a place for me in the future. When my bartender said to me that AI are now capable to writing structured screenplays, though with largely nonsensical dialogue, I thought my days were done as a writer. But fear not! Kaku again comes to the rescue: 'Novelists, scriptwriters, and playwrights will have jobs, since they have to convey realistic scenes, human conflicts, and human triumphs and defeats'. Now that's a vision of the future I can look forward to.   

 

'Men of Mathematics 2' by E. T. Bell

You may not know it but we deal with maths everyday.  Reading this blog, for instance, requires maths for the algorithms that has lead you here and for the computer/ phone/ tablet to be made enabling such reading.  Yet the stories of the men who have pushed the boundaries of the subject that has transformed our world are not popularly known.  In comes E. T. Bell with 'Men of Mathematics 2' a book of short biographies of the major mathematicians from 1793 to 1918.

I read this book as folk tales of extraordinary people who set their minds to understanding the world through the application of mathematics, full of misfortune, humour and world changing discoveries.  Take Evariste Galois: a boy with a 'madness for maths' failed in his examinations due to the stupidity of his examiners, or as one put it 'A candidate of superior intelligence is lost with an examiner of inferior intelligence'. 

 He lived during the Revolution of 1830 and at a gathering of revolutionaries he stood up with a glass in one hand and a pocket knife in the other and declared 'To Louis Philippe'- the King whereupon the next day he was thrown in prison.  He died aged twenty-one and helped lay the foundation for quantum mechanics.  See, it's not all chalkboards and compasses.

 

Poincare said that 'Mathematical discoveries, small or great...are never born of spontaneous generation.  They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and unconscious' and this is what you feel from reading such a book, that the journey is ever continuing and one mathematician takes off from where another leaves.  There is no greatness without learning from the past.  The fact that it is not a solidary pursuit always starting from scratch speaks to how many different things were needed from many people in order to gain the knowledge we have now. 

Mathematics doesn't even have to be approached as a science.  Take Kronecker who 'was an artist who used mathematical formulae as his medium'.  It takes intense creativity to develop the insights needed to proceed and a love of abstract thinking that is like wordplay to numbers.  It's given me a much deeper appreciation of a neglected subject that should be more a part of popular culture.  

Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.

'False Dawn' by John Gray

'The problems facing the world are not fully soluble' writes John Gray (not that one) in his prophetic book 'False Dawn' with the subtitle: Delusions of Global Capitalism.  Gray might be best known for his 'Straw Dogs' a book of aphorisms about the modern human state and general pessimistic outlook scorning both Christianity and Humanism. 

This book may not be a barrel of laughs but it has turned out to be true.  First published in 1998 Gray takes on free market ideology that has been dominant since the 80s.  It's proponents convince the public that the market is the natural state of affairs, to which Gray points out that it is not 'a gift of social evolution.  It is an end-product of social engineering and unyielding political will'.  And with disastrous results. 

What one figure has stuck to me is the divorce rate in the UK in 1992.  One divorce for every two marriages, comparable only to the US.  Unemployment and family breakdown rose after deregulating labour along with a burgeoning underclass unheard of in the rest of Europe.  The visible signs of social erosion after Thatcher are so striking that she was not wrong to claim that she changed everything in Britain.  Certainly it seems that more people are losing out after her than before.

When choice is god than what difference does it make if you are paying for a divorce or pay for a car?  Effectively it nullifies morality and value judgements.  What happens to the things that we can't use money to solve, like a liveable planet or friendship?  Do these become commodified and just a product we can buy and sell?  If I look around my town I can see that the markets aren't good for even businesses let alone creating beautiful surroundings.

I think the quote at the beginning of this blog is useful to think while reading this book.  Gray also says 'free market policies lost political legitimacy while at the same time altering the economy and society in ways that democratic choice cannot reverse'.  This is not utopian thinking but he suggests that what we are becoming is where anarchy is permeant.  In 2009 he wrote an updated foreword after the financial crisis of 2008 where he seems to be vindicated of his view as the correct one before anyone else even considered the question.  We cannot go back and our future is uncertain.  There will be no one way of correcting the situation, if it can be corrected.

A sober read and argued with detail it's the book you need to read to understand out economics today and to be able to at least understand how we got here.

Now it's audience participation time!  If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways:

- by being my patron on Patreon.com

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I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog.

Live long and prosper.

Blog entry on Start Somewhere Project

I've written something for a blog that tries to inspire young artists.  I talk about my journey so far and my ideas about writing linking it with mental health.  Link is below.


Writing For Me is a Way of Being

'Only One Earth' by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos

'Only One Earth' an unofficial report by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos could hardly be more timely, yet it was written in 1972.  It's subtitle, 'The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet', makes clear the subject matter of the book.  How can industrialised and developing countries continue on with their high levels of living while surviving on a resource limited rock?

 It's urgency couldn't be more felt today with books like Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything', George Monbiot's 'Heat' and David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' and the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg our impact on the Earth is well documented, well understood and catastrophic if nothing about it gets done.

This book struck me by being very well written in almost novelistic prose that catches not only the scientific instinct but the emphatic one too.  Our increasing mastery of our world that has grown since the seventeenth centaury has given us extraordinary comfort and well being but, as Monbiot would put it, it is a Faustian bargain where the cost of all our luxuries maybe too high for us to pay.

Though this book is not a doom-and-gloom fest.  It states the facts of our existence and gives a look at the stark future if we do not reduce consumption.  But because I am reading this in the year 2020 it does seem that we are further down the knife edge of living and I find that frightening.

Drawn on from the collective knowledge of forty countries this is truly a global book that tries to take the whole world in it's entirety while compiling the facts.  This makes sense as it was the first photograph of the Earth from the moon that was a catalyst for more environmental campaigning and political policies.

For the history of environmental writing this, for me, is a key book that puts all the data succinctly, comprehensively, and humanely.  Compelling and gripping  it may make you want to join Extinction Rebellion in the hopes of continuing life on this planet where we can experience new challenges and new adventures and for our grand children to experience.

We are bothers and sisters on this spaceship, or as Carl Sagan puts it 'a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam', this is our home and it's the only home we've ever known.

'Lives of the Artists' by Vasari

Every great writer needs a Boswell and in Vasari's 'Lives of the Artists' the Florentine artists have one.  The stories and exploits of great artists such as Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others, about how they got their first starts and the anecdotes behind the great works, is told with insider appreciation of Vasari, himself a painter.  And there is much to wonder at here.

From the story of one painter getting captured by pirates only to be released when he paints such a wonderful painting of the slave owner, to Giotto's 'o' and da Vinci's empathy for caged birds, it makes you feel that those times were incredibly rich and fruitful, a time of humanising development and excellence.

I say a rich time because it wasn't all painting nice pictures, there was war too and then the mathematically minded artists turned engineers creating weapons and defensives to help with the combat.

In fact these artists were very scientifically literate, especially da Vinci who used his sketches as a way of trying to understand how the human body works.  The art they made was another expression of their creative scientific imaginations showing how the divide between the 'two cultures' was not always so and in fact their science helped invigorate their art and visa versa.

Their art was only possible with the patronage of the popes who wanted religious icons in their churches to bring a bit of colour and visual flair to the proceedings.  Their scope of what they could make was, perhaps, a bit narrow but it was a very potent focal point for them to focus in and delve deep in the great biblical subjects that inspired their culture.

These stories inspire me to create short dramas about each of the twenty artists listed as they are not stories that get retold much and yet to have such devotion to master a craft really does leave you in awe.

These artists changed the world for the better.  Thankfully Vasari has wonderfully capture the spirit of those times and left a tangible, if possibly inaccurate, book on the subject that artists in the future will no doubt turn to and draw inspiration from as they make their way through the world.

'Bully for Brontosaurus' by Stephen Jay Gould

'So much of science proceeds by telling stories- and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing' so says Stephen Jay Gould in 'Bully for Brontosaurus' his fifth volume of collected essays in science popularisation which do tell good stories about the various aspects of evolution and considerations for the intellectual world. 

'Some people have seen me as a polymath, but I insist that I am a tradesman' the ever modest, ever humble Gould writes in the introduction implying the hard work involved in learning and the functionality of what is learned.  Certainly by reading him you get a deeper appreciation of just how Darwin has changed culture and how much of his theory seeps into everything.

For Gould Homo sapiens  is a 'tiny and accidental evolutionary twig' that conducts an 'interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness' where 'the history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress'.  Yet this does not seem to dim his enthusiasm for being part of it, to experience it at all, a privilege to be enjoyed if we can be aware enough to.  His love for the subject is contagious as his interesting writing makes you interested in what he is writing about, popular without dumbing down or making concessions.  It is a masterclass in communication.

Making the case for enlightenment Gould is in a tough fight against anti-intellectualism: 

'We live in a profoundly non-intellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and the dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information- all in short (and loud) doses of "easy learning"'.  

In trying by 'noting popular trends and trying to divert some of their energy into rivulets that might benefit learning and education' he gives a tour to a world of ideas, interesting in and of themselves that may prick curiosity and lead someone further down the road of understanding of the world and it's workings for those people who haven't only let the world work for them. 'We must rage against the dying of the light- and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we may also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures of conformity in an anti-intellectual culture'

He is a dispeller of misconceptions about science, 'science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths', and gives descriptions of scientists, 

'You might almost define a good scientist as a person with the horse sense to discern the largest answerable question- and to shun useless issues that sound grander', allowing readers a chance to change their perspective on how to view such matters that may give a greater clarity than previous prejudices afforded.

I've taken a lot of inspiration from Gould in writing my blogs; his friendliness, his kindness and his knowledge are all things that I aspire to personify in my writings.  It's been highly enjoyable to read about the evolution of the typewriter, the furore around Darwin and current culture as he makes it easy for me.  A dip-in book for those odd, loose moments hanging around the house that satisfies while being edifying.

The human race has been a very colourful experiment 'So why not keep this interesting thought experiment around, at least for another planetary second or two?'

'History of the World' by J. M. Roberts

In terms of the universe we have just arrived, yet in our short time we have travelled far  as J. M. Roberts looks back on human existence in 'History of the World'.  How can one write such a book where each epoch requires detailed study in it's own right and also for it to be coherent to read?  With a lot of editing I imagine.  Yet going into our past has been absorbing; civilisations rising and falling, wars and inventions, centuries of stability and stagnation and decades of combustible innovation.  To know where we are is to look back as a means of going forward.

Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War.  First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life.  There are some great stories here.  The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee.  So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.

It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder.  But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one.  People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything.  This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.

As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life.  Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.

It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us.  It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live.  It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.

This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.    

 

'Francis Bacon In Your Blood' by Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt was twenty-one when he first met the now mythic shock painter Francis Bacon, then fifty-three, for an interview.  From there they begun a life long friendship, spiky though it could be, and Peppiatt charts it all in 'Francis Bacon In Your Blood', a subjective memoir.

And what memories.  Peppiatt seems to have remembered all of Bacon's cutting remarks, his witty retorts and his acid phrases.  "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends" was one of his most memorable sayings, probably because it so well distils Bacon's feeling for life.  He was a great boozer; settling in dingy Soho clubs drinking wine after wine (that's bottles, not glasses) and gambling in casinos until his money ran out.  He also seemed to know something about pain.

If you've ever seen a painting by Bacon then you will know that pain was his subject, the great existential questions as to why we suffer.  Cadavers with wide open mouths on plinths and screaming bishops, he was no picturesque portrait painter.  With his brush he could dissect a victim, blood streaming and with a vital viciousness that went beyond mere sadness.

Of his youth little is known and came to painting somewhat late, just after he was thirty.  When asked how he became a painter he says:

"Well, I've spent so much of my life just drifting...from bar to bar, person to person.  I often regret that I didn't have more discipline and concentrate myself when I was young.  I mean, when you think of how many French artists...have been so concentrated from the start.  I didn't really to paint at all seriously until the war.  I did little before, but it was no good.  When the war came, I was turned down because of this asthma of mine.  So I had that time to just drift in and do nothing.  It's true I'd been doing odd jobs to make my way- I worked in an office for a bit, then I tried to design some furniture.  I even became someone's valet.  But I had been thinking a great deal about painting.  about how I might perhaps begin to make this thing work a little."

Worked it did.  Bacon was one of the greatest British painters in the twentieth century who pulled no punches and did extraordinary works of art.

Though a great drinker he was also extremely hard working.  He went over and over canvases and was always trying to go deeper into his subjects for many hours in the day.  "One is never hard enough on oneself" he says.  He was also a great lover of life, laughing until he cries and drinking bottles of champagne as "it's all we have" and that "for some reason, although I believe in nothing, my nervous system is filled with this optimism".

It's no wonder that Peppiatt feels surprised that he's drinking with one of the great masters of art as a friend and confidant.  In fact for Peppiatt, Bacon is like a 'father figure' where he helped guided the young Cambridge student into maturity and worldliness.

Bacon is a great personality and looms large in these pages and though I wouldn't be so comfortable with meeting him, I am glad that he lived (to 82, 82!) and glad that Peppiatt recorded it all for us.  Though Bacon is a spiky figure the friendship between the writer and painter is actually a tender one and an interesting one.  His opinions on then current art trends and his place in it are fascinating glimpses into an uncommon mind.  Yet Peppiatt remembers fairly of his father figure and doesn't write a hagiography as Bacon can be kneecapingly unpleasant and his treatment of those who he dislikes is visceral.  

Reading this book made me feel like I was drinking with them, that close and personal is the tone of this book and it was one hell of a drinking session.

'A History of Warfare' by John Keegan

Starting off with a denouncement of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, 'war is not the continuation of policy by other means', John Keegan begins a thorough survey of all aspects of military adventures throughout history in his 'History of Warfare'.

For a nominal pacifist with deep ignorance of the army I found much to my surprise in this book that has changed the way I see warfare.

For example: did you know that 'the great nobles of Japan...did not seek military reputation at all, but stove for literary glory' thereby meaning that the samurai all wanted to be poets?  Or that, also on the samurai,  'for whom fighting was an act of self-expression by which a man displayed not only his courage but also his individuality'.  This sentence alone gives me a deeper understanding of why man makes war.

Keegan argues that it is not politics that drives war but culture, that 'war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture'.  This somehow makes war into more like an art than a necessary tool for survival.  Yet the objects and stories of war are consumed with fascination by people who want only second-hand experience.  But as Keegan suggests some people are only fit to be soldiers embracing the lifestyle boredom punctuated by moments of terror.

So to the question:  would I fight?  Say their was a group on their way to murder everyone in my town, friends, family, my friendly newsagent, would I try to organise a group with whatever weapons were laying around to fight them off?  I suppose I would have no choice, though as Keegan says

'when men of equal worth fight on unequal terms the side with the better weapons wins'.  Right now I probably couldn't, despite having a black belt in karate (though not practicing for fourteen years), but if I had a few months and some decent weapons then maybe.  But I'll do it Celt style.

The closest I've come to warfare was playing  Gavrilo Princip, assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in street theatre.  I sat on a bench, gun in hand, waiting for my moment.  Then when the time came I launched off in front of the wooden car and fired two shots.  So maybe my revolutionary potential is there.  Acting is one thing but what about the real deal?  Well if war is supposed to be a type of performance I could probably convince myself to do some heavy method acting.

'Just Six Numbers' by Martin Rees

To think that there ae more stars in the sky then there are grains of sand on a beach gives our home a bewildering context.  Carl Sagan says that the work of astronomy is character building and it's clear why: it puts us in our place.

But there is one thing that dominates in this universe and that is all powerful mathematics.  According to Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, there are six numbers more important than the rest that shape the universe.

I read this book like I would read 'The Cloud of Unknowing' as a piece of meditation on the deep forces that call all into being.  It's filled with uncomprehendingly large numbers, complex interactions, and non-common-sense theories.

It is a book to enlarge the imagination by full frontal challenge to all it's previously held notions of space and time.  Marvelling in sentences like 'Time may become like space, so that in a sense there is no beginning of time' it makes me wonder more about what is hidden to us that may be illuminated by science.

Though I have an interest in science I myself am not scientifically literate.  I can barely begin to make sense of the mathematics and the physics of this book, yet I yearn to learn more; because in learning the little bits I can grasp it makes me hungry to have a few more bites before the whole feast of science and the universe.

This book, with it's remarkably clear prose, gives me a chance of understanding what I never knew existed right before my eyes.  It makes us think about things that previously we never gave a second thought and gives us more perspective on who we are, on what our purpose is.

It demands re-reading and it's a short enough book to have a fair chance of multiple re-readings.  It's a great book that I highly recommend even if you are not literate in science.  Don't let that worry you, just be taken on a ride through the universe and enjoy the journey.  If you pick up a few things on the way then it might give you an appetite to learn more, think more, observe more and enjoy the understandings of our world in a wholly new perspective that you might not expect.

'Makind in the Making' by William Howells

Every few years I make a pilgrimage to a very special place.  In Temple Cloud, near Bath, is a building that is my heaven.  It has this divine quality because it houses hundreds of books, some quite old.  I buy about twenty books and spend the next few years reading them.  The last time I went I was becoming more interested in their non-fiction section of old Pelican books and went away with a good selection of physics, biology, education and history.

One of them was the very first to be read, William Howells 'Mankind in the Making', discussing evolution.  Published in 1959 it goes into detail about evolution in human beings, from the first early days of walking upright to what could be called modern day humanity, with a informative yet easy enough to read style.  These books may seem a bit more formal than todays non-fiction casual easing-you-into-their-arms friendliness but they don't condescend as much as you might think.  Their aim is to be enlightening not to be your friend.

In this instance they are the best kind of authority.  They that know more than you do and are happy to pass that knowledge for your own benefit.  In short: a true educator.  

In this department I know little about evolution other than the basics, a theory that seemed to me in Secondary School eminently plausible.  That animals adapt to their surroundings seems safe to accept and I found it easier to do so.  What I couldn't grasp was the billions of years needed to see species adapt into new species (still it is a tough job and a fit subject for meditation), nor did I understand just how revolutionary the idea is.  So here comes Howells doing the job that I had trouble to do for myself.  And what a job it is

What's interesting is that this is not supposed to be a remarkable book.  In fact the presentation of facts almost seem banal and totally accepted.  Though the idea of evolution, in it's present Darwinian form, has only been around for just over a hundred years yet biologists have made it a cornerstone of biology, showing that without it you get an incomplete picture of the diversity of life.  The implications of this idea is fleshed out by Howells, who joins the dots and links the links of the theory.

I found this book to be compelling- testament to the fact that I actually finished it in good time- and it's story, the story of us, fascinating.  The fact that our foot is our most human characteristic surprised and delighted me as did many other of the facts that are contained in this book.  The fact that evolution works on such a large timescale is a challenge to the imagination and its one that stimulates me to think deeper and provokes my wonder.

How could it be that a dog was once a wolf?  How could it be that we are so shaped by the world that our forms change?  It is exciting and inspiring to know that our day to day lives contain this almost cosmic quality where our behaviours today are the new limbs of tomorrow.

Howells does a fine job at explaining patiently everything a lay person would want to know about evolution.  The style might seem a tad deated but it is perfectly readable for someone who wants a good primer on the subject and doesn't know where to start.

It's a book that I'll enjoy re-reading in order to dredge up the fine jewels from the depths of evolutionary theory.  To think of when I am in the woods or in front of a fire.