I spotted this at the library and thought it would make for a fun pairing with another book I’m reading, This Thing of Darkness, a chunky novel about I spotted this at the library and thought it would make for a fun pairing with another book I’m reading, This Thing of Darkness, a chunky novel about Captain Robert FitzRoy’s expeditions to Tierra del Fuego (on one of which he was accompanied by Charles Darwin on the Beagle). But I was disappointed by the vague plot and unrealistic art in this picture book.
I understand simplifying events for children, but here that’s to the point of historical inaccuracy. Orundellico/Jemmy was one of four Fuegian natives taken by ship to England, and he wasn’t a boy, as depicted here, but a teenager of 15 to 16. His reaction to a new culture is portrayed reasonably well, but there’s no indication of him having to learn another language or of the difficulty of readjusting to life when the Beagle returned him to his home a year later. (A page at the end gives a bit more context on the latter point, but still not the full story.)
White people and England are depicted through prim paper cut art, as opposed to the loose lines and lush colors used for Jemmy (whose head often looks like a red-orange thumbprint with hair) and the Argentinian and ocean scenery. Tierra del Fuego is shown as a land of rainforest, which I don’t think is correct. I can see why contrasting illustration styles were chosen, but I would have preferred more representativeness....more
Sopel has been the BBC’s North America Editor since 2014. Whatever the Trump administration’s lasting effects for the nation and for the world, it wasSopel has been the BBC’s North America Editor since 2014. Whatever the Trump administration’s lasting effects for the nation and for the world, it was at least good for Sopel’s career – he got three books out of covering 45’s nonsense. This third one started off as a diary of the 2020 election campaign, beginning in July 2019, but of course soon morphed into something slightly different: a chronicle of life in D.C. and London during Covid-19 and a record of the Trump mishandling of the pandemic. But as well as a farcical election process and a public health crisis, 2020’s perfect storm also included economic collapse and social upheaval – thanks to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests worldwide plus isolated rioting.
I’ve read six books about 2020 (whether that’s Covid, nature, or just general events) so far. It’s been an unusual experience reliving such recent history. If you’re a big news junkie, you might find the Sopel boring, but I only see peripheral headlines on social media. That meant that this served as a good reminder for me of the timeline of events and the full catalogue of outrages committed by Trump and his cronies. You just have to shake your head over the litany of ridiculous things he said and did, and got away with – any one of which might have sunk another president or candidate. Sopel shares that astonishment:
“That moment when you think something is a game changer for Donald Trump, only to re-remember that Donald Trump has changed the game.”
“It was only a few days ago that I declared the Trump briefing I had been to at the White House the most batshit crazy thing ever. Well, this evening I have been to another one.”
The style is breezy and off-the-cuff most of the time, so the book reads quickly. There’s a good balance between world events and personal ones, with his family split across the UK and Australia. Overall, though, this has been underedited. A potential issue with any diary is repetition across the entries, and this is no exception. Whether Sopel was submitting chunks or handed in the whole manuscript at once, an editor should have picked up on this – it can be as simple as introducing a key player, e.g. a state governor, on one page and then again a few pages later, as if they’d not been mentioned before. A few tweaks of this type could have made the whole thing more cohesive and added to the sense of growing hindsight, which is one of the best qualities of the narrative. There are also plenty of typos of the kind that a fact-checker should have caught, such as a “Rueben sandwich” and “Rehobeth Beach.”
I appreciated the insight into differences from the British system (for example, there are no campaign spending limits in the USA, so it’s all about fundraising) and Trump’s good points, such as they are – Sopel found him very accessible, even getting to ask him five questions over the course of one news conference. I thought it would be depressing reading back through the events of 2020, but for the most part the knowledge that everything turned out “right” allowed me to see the humor of it. Still, I found it excruciating reading about the four days following the election – I didn’t want to go through all that uncertainty again.
Sopel was not a familiar personality to me because I don’t have a television; I read this because his sister is in my book club, so we’re doing this for our May meeting on Zoom and hope to have the man himself join us. One of the main questions I’m keen to ask is whether his impression of Biden – whom he consistently portrays as old, sleepy, dull, and uninspiring – has improved in the months that he’s been in office. (Granted, anyone was better than Trump, but I think Biden has been impressively bold and has turned the pandemic response around.) I’d also like to know how this book would have been different had Trump won. The final multi-part entry is from 7 November, with only the Introduction reflecting one month later. Certainly, those few pages would have set a completely different tone....more
(3.5) I saw Sands speak about this book as part of the online Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature last year and afterwards promptly ordered (3.5) I saw Sands speak about this book as part of the online Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature last year and afterwards promptly ordered all of the speakers’ books (including How Not to Be Afraid by Gareth Higgins). She goes on a series of journeys, most pre-Covid and a few after, to experience tastes of the monastic life in Japan, Italy, France and so on. The slower pace of life she discovers staying as a guest at abbeys and monasteries is a tonic given her high-stress job at the time (heading up a British radio programme; she had previously edited a newspaper, which was similarly tied to the fast-paced news cycle).
The subtitle is somewhat misleading in that Sands doesn’t draw any particularly profound or definitive conclusions. These are just pleasant travels and gentle thoughts on humility and simplicity. The Salzburg chapter was disappointing in that it just turns into an excuse for silly Sound of Music tourism, and the Lindisfarne one didn’t add anything to my experience of having visited in July. The Egypt and Bhutan chapters were probably my favourites....more
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