A Partisan's Daughter (de Bernieres)

Novella from de Bernieres written in the form of a conversation. Chris is bored, middle aged, middle England, suffering loss of meaning in a tired marriage that has past its sell-buy date. Roza is from Yugoslavia and full of all the passion that Chris is missing from his life. They meet when Chris attempts to pick up a prostitute, and mistakenly chooses Roza. He is embarrased into offering her a lift home. Thus begins their relatonship, with Chris finding excuses to visit, to listen to Roza's stories of her life in Yugoslavia with her Partisan father and her exploits since moving to London. The stories evolve in alternating monologue, with each telling their side of the story.

The story is a slow burner, with an evolving relationship between the characters and an underlying sexually charged connecton, that is clearly building to a crescendo. The manner of the apogee is unexpected from the earlier story, but suitably poignant. The only let-down is the concluson of the book following this point, which feels disappointingly rapid and concluded in haste.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Jon Ronson)

This is written as a documentary exploration of some truly bizarre forms of research into alternative forms of killing, torture and manipulation by various governments, mainly US and UK. While similar to a Michael Moore exposure, it's also so close to a novel that it's hard to tell whether this is truth or fiction (take Moore's Sicko and add in The Constant Gardener). The book investigates forms of development of the human brain usually associated with the personal development movement, but applied to military and government control. From staring at goats (to kill them) to walking through walls, this covers a number of esoteric development skills. The reporting lists interviews with people purported to be involved in this research, and interweaves well-documented cases that add semblance of veracity to these reports. But the evidence is thin.

As a light-hearted holiday read, this deserves marks for an imaginative overview of potentially crazy investments of public funds. As an investigative journal, this is light on evidence and poorly organised to prove a point. Read it and laugh, and suspend belief.

The Black Swan (Naseem Taleb)

This book is written by a proud sceptic, who challenges all our assumptions about systems and beliefs in modern science and particularly economics. The author worked in large financial firms, and (fore)-saw the downfall of current beliefs. He argues strenuously for people to avoid believing in the charlatans, and demonstrates numerous failings of the systems. But he fails to offer a better way so, despite his displayed intellect and thinking prowess, he comes across as a whiner. This is unfortunate, as I warmed to his message, but I found myself constantly waiting for the great revelation of how things could be run better. It never really appeared.

There is also a follow-up essay from the author - The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics and finally a set of actions for the future. While Mark Vernon argues there is a flaw in the black swan argument.

Lost for Words (John Humphreys)

The first half of this book is a long rumbling grumble about the state of modern youth, modern teaching and all things modern that impact on the English language. Humphreys admits that language changes over the centuries (and decades) and decries the idea of an English Académie Française to protect the language from change, but he can't help complaining about the laissez faire approach this leads to. Or is that "to which this leads", avoiding sentence-ending prepositions. The second half describes the failures of politicians, bureaucrats and advertising men in their attempts to promote messages that contort simple English into an unrecognisable list of over-syllabic verbised nouns, superfluous additional extra words and super-long sentences that serve to confuse more than inform.

And Humphreys is of course correct: we do not want a language dominated by the culture of cool nor by the excesses of bureaucrats. But in putting across this message, he argues himself in circles. He stands in the middle ground and argues for balance between changes and rules, which is precisely the position the English language adopts. As the author's question would be to any politician (around 8am) - "... and your point is?".

The Calendar (David Ewing Duncan)

Describing a story that still has not run its full course, this book takes on the challenge of covering calendar designs from Mayan civilisations to the present day. The subject-matter is immense and covers Babylonian, Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Medieval attempts to measure, define and unite the lunar, sidereal and tropical years. With a heavy emphasis on the difficulty of defining Easter, the book focuses on the disputes with the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, culminating in the Definition of the Gregorian calendar, describing the various people involved in previous attempts to reform the calendar an the people who succeeded. But this results in a long rambling synopsis of a millennium of European history, with various bits of Indian, Arabic and African stories thrown in.

The book covers a huge amount of detail about the various attempts to define the calendar, but falls between scholarly and coffee table science book. Touching on the science and people involved, the book fails to grip in telling an interesting story, but is adequate at informing. I was interested in the description of riots over the imposition of the Gregorian calendar, with the loss of 10 days in most of Europe (11 in England) as I have previously found this is disputed by some.

Nearly made it ... but not quite recommended (3 star)

Non-fiction

• The Greatest Salesman in the World - an average parable about sales and relationship skills that plods along in a rambling story.

Novels

• Trinity - fails to build on a great start. Read Redemption instead.


• The Girl at the Lion d'Or - meandering novel set in 1930's France, that fails to live up to Birdsong or Charlotte Gray.


• Birds without Wings - never quite re-generates the emotional highs and lows of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and suffers from a surfeit of history lessons in the background.

Books rated 1 or 2 stars are only listed on the Amazon site.