Mustn't Grumble

 

Mustn’t Grumble by Graham Lawton (2021 Headline Home hardcover 342pp)

 

Subtitled “The surprising science of everyday ailments and why we’re always a bit ill” this book pretty much lives up to the description with a few catches.

Graham Lawton is a staff writer for the venerable New Scientist magazine and holds degrees in both Biochemistry and Science Communication. As a result, the content isn’t million miles from what you’d find in a popular science journal. The book is divided into six sections each pertaining to a particular part of the body or type of illness – e.g.: ‘Ears, Nose & Throat’, “Bad Guts” and so on. In each of these categories he’s written quite short bite-sized magazine-style items on particular ailments, around one hundred of them in total. He shies away from more serious, potentially fatal maladies and often tells the reader to seek professional help if they think something more serious is going on.

Lawton’s writing is light and humorous, often using anecdotes about his own life or those of his friends and family to illustrate a point. On the downside his understanding of many of the topics seems slight and superficial. I was hoping he’d interview the scientists working in these areas and tell us what the latest research has uncovered. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of that going in in these pages. Of course, many of the conditions he writes about are still semi-mysterious, the exact reason why we suffer from many of them remain unknown and only guessed at by medical science.

I read this book over a few days and found it a little overwhelming with sameness and repetition, probably better to dip in and out of over a longer period of time. Some of it is not for the squeamish, plenty of descriptions that will make you cringe whether you’ve experienced them yourself or not.

So, one for the popular science fan or hypochondriac among you. Nothing too heavy and quite entertaining in a way.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

 

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (2021 Houghton Mifflin hardcover 234pp)

 

Last year I had the pleasure of reading Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” (2006) a graphic novel autobiographical work which followed her life from childhood and ended up focussing on her relationship with her father. I do also possess the sequel “Are You My Mother?” (2012) but have yet to actually read it. As you probably can guess that volume covers her mother and the past life she never told young Alison.

“The Secret to Superhuman Strength” is yet another graphic novel memoir from Bechdel, this time ostensibly focussed on her life and the various fitness fads and crazes she has taken part in. Well at least it starts out following that formula but by the end it has become something much more.

The book is divided up into sections, each covering a decade from the 1960s to 2020s which also fits each decade of Bechdel’s life. As a child she was fascinated by the strong man fitness ads she saw in comics and fantasied about becoming the strongest kid at her school to overcome bullies etc. Not allowed to play boys’ sports she finds her own ways to exercise and keep fit. As the years pass it becomes a bit of an obsession and she becomes a dedicated follower of all the latest fads. Bechdel shows us the necessary and fashionable equipment of each era in neat little asides that become a running gag in the book.

Part way through the book starts to broaden its focus, diverging to cover discussions of the meaning of life itself, eastern mysticism and the lives of several free-thinkers over the last couple of centuries. Bechdel shows us her life warts and all as she seeks for …something she can’t quite reach with all the sports, exercise and martial arts classes. She drinks, she falls in and out of love and begins a career as an artist drawing cartoons and eventually producing books of her own.

All of this is drawn in a precise line-work style with occasional pages in a looser more expressionist form. Unlike “Fun Home” this book is in full colour although the colours are purposely somewhat muted.

While some of it necessarily re-treads the ground covered in “Fun Home” I found it a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

The Moon's A Balloon

The Moon’s A Balloon by David Niven (2016(1971) Penguin 336pp)

 

This is a 2016 reprint of a memoir that originally was published over 50 years ago (the same year I was born!). It’s been wildly popular and sold millions of copies over the decades. As a result, it pretty much set the template for the modern celebrity tell-all book.

Niven basically runs through his life on chronological order, from the death of his father at Gallipoli in 1915 to the late 1960s. Oddly enough for a book about a movie star, I found the non-movie stuff far more interesting. We follow the ups and downs of his childhood school life including a strange long-term relation he develops with a prostitute he meets whilst walking the streets of London at night, age 14. His spotty academic career leads him to all sort of horrible situations before he ends up training to be an officer in the Army. His first posting overseas to Malta bookends this fascinating section of the book after which we are regaled by tales of his travels to America and his eventual new life in the movie business. The showbiz stuff is a seemingly endless list of meeting certain famous people – actors directors and agents etc and going to assorted parties. He lives a good life but never seems to be far from disaster and melancholy. Things pick up again when he returns to England after the outbreak of World War Two determined to enlist in the armed forces and play his part. He ends up in what we would today call “Special Forces” and takes part in many important actions against the Nazis. Having pissed off the wrong big-wigs in Hollywood, he struggles to find regular acting work after the war and ends up setting up his own production company to make TV programmes along with some friends. In the late 1950s and early 60s Hollywood comes calling and he ends up winning an Academy Award for his efforts. He rapidly ends things there after showing some disdain for the then current ‘counter-culture’

The book is entertaining enough and 50+ years ago some of the content must have been shocking to many readers. To a twenty-first century reader, the writing style does feel somewhat dated. The terminology Niven often uses seems to be from even further into the past – he was educated a century ago. Niven is often self-effacing and quick to point out his mistakes but then a few pages later he’s blowing his own trumpet, seemingly the most intelligent, attractive and all-round wonderful guy in any room.

Celebrity memoirs continue to be written and sell in huge quantities, all as a result of this book paving the way. I had read references to and quotes from this work for decades, now I finally read it and you could do much worse than to pick it up.