Book report 1

I thought I might keep track of the books I’m reading as it might be interesting to look back and remember the things that were occupying my mind.

On the boat over, I was engrossed in the second half of Nothing to Envy: Love, Life, and Death in North Korea, winner of the 2010 BBC prize for non-fiction by Barbara Demick.  I hadn’t realised that in the decades following the Korean War, North Korea’s economic performance outstripped South Korea’s, leading them to be held up as the shining example of successful Communism.  It wasn’t until the Soviet Union collapsed, eliminating North Korea’s free supply of energy and a primary trading partner, that economic conditions descended into a primitive subsistence (not that social conditions had ever been any better than Orwell’s 1984).  Although the electrical infrastructure remains in place, and you can see fallen or rusting power lines throughout the country, the country is almost entirely without electricity and thus the means of production.  The book follows the stories of six defectors, whose struggles don’t end when they make it to South Korea.  The author admits that the book is by no means a balanced or comprehensive picture simply because there is no access to the information that would be required to make it so.

Then I jumped into Coonardoo, a book written in 1926 by Katharine Susannah Prichard about the coexistence of a white family who runs a cattle station and the Aboriginal community that works for them in exchange for food and other basic necessities.  The titular character is a young Aboriginal girl who grows up alongside the future master of the station, who struggles throughout the book with his own inclinations versus what society tells him is an appropriate relationship with Coonardoo.  The plot itself isn’t surprising, although apparently it was very shocking in 1926 to even hint that an emotional attachment could exist between white and Aboriginal people.  Some of the racism inherent in the times reads through in the language and descriptions used, but the most interesting aspect of reading the book is hearing the author possibly struggle herself as she bravely counters popular thinking.  On a more visceral level, it also made me dread the heat we may encounter in Western Australia.

Now I’m racing to the finish of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.  I’ve covered almost 400 pages in less than 48 hours, because I literally can’t put it down.  I’ve woken up the past two mornings and tried to coax Eric back to sleep so I can read by my headlamp.  The author is a doctor who began specialising in oncology in 2004, but he is also a brilliant writer.  I didn’t realise just how ad hoc the search for a cure for cancer, which really isn’t a singular thing at all anyway, has been.  When I was younger and not eating beef because of the destruction of Amazonian rainforests, one reason was always that the biodiversity being lost could potentially hold the cure for cancer.  That actually seems true now that I’ve read about chemists milking just about every plant they can find in an empirical search for anything that will stop mutant cells from multiplying.  

On a personal note, it’s been really interesting to read about the search for a cure has been informed as the same research and statistical methods used in my field developed from about the 1920s. 

I’ve been lucky so far and really enjoyed all three books, which I would recommend to anyone.