BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

An Experiment With Time (1927, revised edition 1935) J W Dunne   13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time (2009) Michael Brooks   An Experiment With Time is a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of the author's and others' experience of precognition in dreams. It is anomalous but it is also a serious if difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem of precognition at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness. However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not.  ...

A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: A History of Hammer Horror Films (2007)   Sinclair McKay Hammer Films may have been founded in 1935 but it only produced anything of consequence, other than the first of its Quatermass series in 1955, when Peter Cushing emerged as Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).  Until its demise (in its original incarnation) as film maker in 1979 (although its story really ends in 1974 to all intents and purposes), it became known for a peculiarly English Gothic take on themes originally developed by Universal Studios in the 1930s but derived from English literary models. There was Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy as well as a homegrown Quatermass series and Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and Dennis Wheatley adaptations ( Hound of the Baskervilles , She and The Devil Rides Out respectively). Highly variable in quality, its keynote stars were Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee with Ingrid Pitt as perhaps the best known female st...

The World of Perception (2002 Publication of 1948 Radio Lectures) Maurice Merleau-Ponty   Mid-twentieth century revolutions in thought have overturned much of the basis for an easy acceptance of Descartes and later Kant as guides to life, with Kierkegaard and Nietzche as early pioneers in unravelling some of the presumptions of essentialism. This is not to denigrate these 'great thinkers' of the canon but only to say that new thinking will inevitable emerge from old thoughts. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a very significant figure in this context, not merely within modern continental philosophy but in preparing the ground for what looks likely to be seen as a much wider and consequent cultural revolution, one derived from the extension of the insights of the existentialist, phenomenological and hermeneutic schools, first into art and culture and increasingly into society and politics. This slim volume represents seven radio lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in 1948. The for...

Sex in History (1980) Reay Tannahill Art Nouveau and the Erotic (2000) Ghislaine Wood Sex in History is over forty years old but still provides an informed, often wry, and certainly intelligent review of the history of sexuality. It is a first point of call for anyone new to the subject who is looking to understand how we became what we are both as a culture and as individuals (at least in the West).  Tannahill's judgement is excellent, given the facts at her disposal. I strongly approve of her refusal to take at face value any later imposition of theory on how minds worked in the past. We can know nothing of past thoughts.  The Freudianism that was still regarded as respectable when she was writing the book is now seen for what it is - another 'grand projet' from comfortably off dead white males and their camp-followers. It gets only a couple of mentions and then with not much respect. Good! She is also not sentimental. The Amerindians may have been treated appal...

Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004) Robert A Segal   Myth is a disappointing introduction to mythology, a rather plodding book that might be termed 'wikipedia plus' - that is, it is a longer general survey with more authority than you might find online. Ultimately it is a mere enumeration of Western intellectual responses to myth, forced into a straitjacket of being reviewed through the prism of the various disciplines created by the West for the West. The whole is partially built around an extremely weak and irritating attempt to test each set of theories against the Adonis myth. It lacks the narrative coherence of, for example, Glyn Daniels' excellent short history of archaeology. The book has one, surely unintended, effect. This is the realisation that many jobsworth if brilliant thinkers, over the last two hundred or so years, have taken the limited material of the past - incomplete and whose precise context has long since been lost - in order to weave e...