WOW - this is unbelievable. This could have been written with so much psychiatric-medical jargon it would be impossible for anyone without a masters in the field to comprehend...however, nothing could further from what Dr. Baer has delivered in this book. Intelligent and so very real - I was left at the conclusion of the book sitting almost in a state of dumbfoundedness... and the first word I uttered was - WOW...Imagine pretending to be asleep in order to overhear conversations between your family and friends, so that you can learn your mother's name, or where your husband works. Karen was continually searching for ways to hide her obvious insanity until a desperate call to a crisis hot-line in 1989, led her to Dr. Richard Baer. The complexities of the human mind have never before been revealed with such detail, dimension and compassion. Horrific, unimaginable abuse had forced Karen to create different personalities, with widely varying characteristics and abilities. As new personalities were introduced, the depth of Karen's suffering became obvious, as did the fear that the darkness would consume her. With careful guidance and unwavering patience, Dr. Baer was able to gain the individual trust of the seventeen alters, convincing each that although they had been created to protect Karen, her very survival now depended upon their complete and total destruction. .

This is an amazing read! The level of abuse, the detailed characteristics of the created alters are almost beyond comprehension and leads you to question how it is someone that has suffered so greatly could ever be whole again. Which is, yet another testament to the human will to survive. Switching Time is by far one of the best non-fiction books I have read in years. Just as the alters were created as a means of survival, during the darkest and most frightening experiences imaginable, their destruction became a necessary step in the journey from divided survival to whole living. I highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys a compelling, thought provoking, inspiring read... absolutely 5 stars!

Happy Reading!RJ

Writers make poor lovers. So HAZLITT IN LOVE and its subject reminds us at regular intervals. The true story of the idolised desire of a vain, self-absorbed theatre critic for his landlady’s teasing daughter is an object lesson; one in how not to respond to rebuttals.

In Jon Cook’s marvellous biographical ‘shortbook,’ the case of William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830) highlights the consequence of absence making the heart grow fonder. Young Sarah Walker becomes all touchy feely from the morning she first delivers breakfast to Hazlitt’s room in London’s Southampton Buildings. Hazlitt had just separated from his first wife. While the nineteen-year-old had an older sister, it was Sarah alone appeared each morning at his door.

What isn’t discussed in the book – presumably due to lack of physical evidence – is why this had to be. There are intimations her mother wasn’t averse to using her daughter as a means to detaining marriageable star tenants. Sarah wasn’t, apparently, especially pretty, and thinner than what Hazlitt’s soon-to-be-divorced wife later claimed he preferred in a girl. (Mrs. Hazlitt (also named Sarah) maintains an admirable strength of character and independence throughout the affair). But there was a knowingness in the air which Hazlitt – naïve in adoration – stumbled upon rather too late. Coming down after breakfast one morning, he overhears Sarah’s mother, brother, and Sarah herself, making jibes about the comparative penis sizes of their tenants. This appals Hazlitt who begins to wonder if he is in fact in thrall to a whore, rather than simply a boarding house daughter. A scene considered for inclusion but dropped from 'Liber Amoris'; his anonymous book on the affair.

Hazlitt was a radical working under the reign of the dissolute daddy’s boy George IV - a contemporary of Byron and Shelley, though closer to Keats both in geography and in class. Condescended as another of the Cockney School by the Tory editorial snobs of Edinburgh and London, Hazlitt too often fell into their traps by publicly wearing his aching heart on his sleeve. Essays on Character or On Dreams frequently fall to self-analysis on his lack of success as a lover. These would ultimately be absorbed into the collection of fictitious, reworded, and unsent letters on the battleground and surrender of love, Liber Amoris.

That such an intelligent man of forty-two (my own age) should express such desperate feelings reads as almost pathetic. But, reading between the lines, what also comes across is a man experiencing the classic mid-life crisis. He is at a crossroads in his life and career, not really knowing where either are heading, and clings to the nearest glimpse of hope that crosses his path. Whether Sarah Walker took advantage of this knowledge or he unfairly unloaded it upon an innocent we’ll probably never know. But, without taking sides, Jon Cook makes a fair fist of delineating Hazlitt’s undoubted obsession.

Hazlitt makes regular returns to Southampton Buildings – as a ‘vacant’ tenant - long after he’s been snubbed. Still desperate to interpret and re-interpret the smallest response from Sarah he might read as acquiescence, hope is the most he leaves with - but never satisfaction.

Hazlitt – despite the vain melancholy shared amongst the writers of his generation – was never gregarious. Not the patronage of London’s Literati for him. Perhaps this was the problem. Like other visionaries considered mad by them later in life, (Blake, for example) he spends far too much time alone with his ideas and ideals to take a view of himself that is anything other than subjective.

Ultimately, the intellectual male writer treats life on paper as an adventure in which to escape. Any subject tackled is empowering to the mind, taking it, and him, beyond the banal truth of his four surrounding walls. HAZLITT IN LOVE delivers a stark reminder about what he might expect to face on his return.

Humphrey Jennings by Kevin Jackson

It is typical of our country’s short-term collective memory that most Britons who call themselves film fans have never heard the name, Humphrey Jennings. But four whole years before feature directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger fantastically linked the stoical English of World War II to their ancestors in the days of Chaucer, (in ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1944)), one maker of the more modest, burgeoning, documentary short offered local picture-houses equally poetic glimpses as social realism. For Humphrey Jennings was a poetically inclined film director who elevated the public information film of the 1930s’ - once stilted, overtly dull and anodyne - into a personalised thing of hope and wonder.

Kevin Jackson’s painstakingly researched biography evokes the pre-War world of a Cambridge-educated minor artist gifted with allusions of grandeur.

(Indeed, so painstakingly researched, the level of information saturation is often in danger of drowning its central figure in a welter of extemporaneous, academic quotes). Never would Jennings knowingly undersell himself when placing himself next to those in his craft who’d already achieved their goals. But what also emerges further on into the life is a man with knowledge of his modest place in the greater scheme of things.

Harbouring an intense interest, from his youth, in the people and climate that founded and sustained the Industrial Revolution, Jennings set to work on a pet project that would intellectually sustain him through the meagre, hungry years of his university days and beyond; one that gravitated toward no particular art at all. For this reason, he would keep, and constantly add to, this iconic and varied manuscript over most of his adult life. Building into a scrapbook on English social history, ‘Pandemonium’ became an ongoing labour of love; more pictorial and poetic than literary and easily surpassing one-thousand pages when still unpublished by his death.

Meantime, he was diarising in the more commercial form of cheaply made propaganda films; first with the GPO Unit from the mid-thirties, then with Crown during the War. Jackson delineates the socialist desire that compelled Jennings to portray real people and their lives in heroic terms; be they London’s ARP Wardens on fire-watching duty or Welsh miners re-enacting a recent Czech village massacre by the SS. In such ways, Jennings evokes a slightly more privileged Ken Loach. (Not that much more so, since Jennings always seemed to be living hand to mouth but well beyond his means through his unwavering self-belief). Contributors often marvel via quotes about how he could be found balancing precariously on recently bombed rafters, or perched upon a windswept hillock or van roof to acquire a shot that might somehow defy the limited budget afforded him by the Government’s propaganda department. His tall, blonde, willowy and angular frame making his eventual fate seemingly inevitably prophetic. Despite the unflinching ego, Jennings only real enemies were few, and then only because they harboured personal visions of their own, such as his influential boss at the GPO Unit, John Grierson.

This is a fascinating account for sure; mainly for those with a passionate interest in the history of British film and its makers. Be half-aware of the overlong epilogue though, which unfolds, in laborious detail, Jennings’s widow and his friends foiled attempts to find a publisher for ‘Pandemonium.’ A trial that took – from his premature death in 1950 - thirty-five years. Yet, stick with this if you can. You will be rewarded by a writer who clearly loves his subject, if, perhaps, just a little too much.

I'm not generally a reader of biographies, but when I saw that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had written one, I just had to read it. 

Ali came to international prominence in 2004, with the murder of film-maker Theo Van Gogh. He was killed by a Muslim fanatic for daring to making a film with Ali about women and Islam. A long letter, addressed to Ali and stabbed into his chest with a butcher's knife said, among other things, "You're next". Initially, the Dutch government swung into action and gave Ali full protection, moving her around from safe house to safe house, country to country, much as the UK did for Salman Rushdie. But then political interests in Holland stripped her of her Dutch citizenship and forced her into hiding at her own expense, eventually resulting in a move to the USA, where she currently resides, speaking out against Islam and for the rights of Muslim women.

This book is the story of her life and the events leading up to Van Gogh's murder, from her early childhood in Somalia to her teen years in Kenya and her flight to Holland as a refugee. Throughout, she never flinches from including the most graphic details, from a harrowing account of her genital mutilation (or circumcision, or excision, or whatever politically-correct culturally-relativist euphemism you want to use for it) to the Muslim teacher who beat the Q'ranic teachings into her so hard she nearly died of a fractured skull, to the moments of joy and love she experienced with early boyfriends and friends and protectors in Africa and Europe. 

Initially, Ali tried hard to be a good Muslim woman and to follow the dictates of the Prophet to the letter - but as she matured, both physically and in her ability to reason, she found that she could not reconcile Islam with what she knew to be true about the world, so gradually she became an atheist - and earned, thereby, the rejection of her family and the condemnation of Islamists all over the world, culminating in the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the threats to her own life.

As an account of a remarkable life, this book stands out; but it is even more powerful as an indictment of Islam, and in particular Islam's attitude to and teachings about women. If you care about women, and the future of the world in the face of the threat of Islam, you really need to read this book.

Summary: Bo Peabody tells, in amusing vignettes, the story of how he became an entrepreneur and the lessons he learned along the way.

Review: One of those slim little books that's good for inspiration if you're a youngster working on starting your own business. If I get a copy, I'll be putting it on my "pick-me-up" bookshelf.

N: The chapter headings themselves contain great advice - here they are: Lucky or smart? Entrepreneurs are born, not made. Entrepreneurs are B-Students, Managers are A-Students. Great is the enemy of good. Start-ups attract sociopaths. Practice blind faith. Learn to love the word "no." Prepare to be powerless. The best defense is a gracious offense. Don't believe your own press. In fact, don't read. Always be selling your stock. Know what you don't know.

Q, xii: I was smart enough to realize I was getting lucky. (what Bo Peabody says when people ask him if it was luck or smarts that made him successful)

Q, 4: Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies.

Q, 5: In other words, the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure that a lot of things happen.

Q, 5: ...the entrepreneur has two tasks: 1. Create an environment where smart people will gather. and 2. Be smart enough to stay out of the way and let luck happen.

P, 15-18: Good managers are A students. A students know one thing and know it very well and want to do things perfectly all the time. Good entrepreneurs are B students. B students aren't good at any one thing, but they can do many things with some degree of competence.

Q, 19: Greatness is exactly the wrong thing for entrepreneurs to strive for. I tell my colleagues: "Never let great be the enemy of good." A good decision made quickly is far better than a great decision made slowly.

Q, 20: Start-ups are like extreme-skiing runs. The person who wins is the one who screws up the least and doesn't die. Success in a start-up is being around tomorrow, a lot of days in a row.

Q, 21: If you survive, you will succeed. (Talking about startups)

Q, 22: Ordinary people don't agree to work for start-ups. They go get ordinary jobs. So, as an entrepreneur, you'd better like odd people, because that's who is going to agree to work with you.

N, 31-32: Bo tells the story of how he "rejects his rejection" from Williams College and works with the admissions department to prepare himself to go to that school the next year. Good advice for someone who wants to do anything.

Q, 32: Train yourself not to shut down when you hear the word "no." That is in fact just the time to really start fighting. No human being likes to say "no" to another human being. When he does, he is at his weakest moment. Take that opportunity, and start selling.

Q, 50: Good VCs know that the key ingredient in a start-up's growth is not how big the company actually will be but how big the entrepreneur thinks it can be.

Finally, the longest read, for some considerable time, has been completed.

"Mao" took the best part of four months, on and off, with plenty of sideways seducation into a library occupied by less harrowing reads. Not that this was a book I was reluctant to read but once on the relentless road of Mao's self promotion, shameless manipulation, endless exploitation and callous treatment of his fellow Chinese, it proved to be a gruelling and tortuous slog at times. Short comfort breaks developed into periods of long abstinence, which was more than was ever offered to Mao's long suffering countrymen and women.

It has to be said that it is very much anti-Mao text but even if only 10% of the authors' observations are accurate, he emerges as a Titan class dictator. Not that I wish to disparage the authors, who have written a massive book full of the most extraordinary details and eye witness accounts from people who even now could suffer because of their revelations. The research is wide ranging and well recorded, following Mao's life from his early peasant origins to his last breathe as a tyrannous despot who ruled as a latter day Emperor in all but name.

Considering he was a major world player for a significant part of my life, I previously knew very little about him and his motivators. From this book, it would appear there was only one motivator. Himself. According to the authors, nothing and nobody appear to have had any call on him, not his mother, brothers, children, wives or indeed any human agency. Terror and mind control were combined to keep millions of people in a dehumanised and dehumanising condition.

The chronological pace of the book allowed plenty of time to absorb the political machinations of a mind acutely tuned to self preservation and heedless disregard for an ancient people and their civilisation.

The difficulties in reading this book, apart from the unrelenting cruelty, included the sheer physical size of the book, the complexity of the politics, the vast time period and ultimately the revulsion felt towards the subject of the book, Mao himself. In the interests of balance, it would be useful to read another account of his life and perhaps in time, I will. But I felt like a weight had been lifted after I finished the last page and it's a relief to turn from this to other, softer reads. Ultimately, I think of the book as an astounding work of research and a respectful homage to Chinese people who suffered too much, too long.

Joanne Drayton successfully introduces us to the reclusive Ngaio Marsh, her extraordinary success, and her love for the theatre, the arts, her friends and the country she loved and would always call home.

Ngaio Marsh was still at school in New Zealand when, in the summer of 1912, her parents and a group of friends travelled via train from Christchurch to Oxford where they had lunch at a pub, then ambled with two horse-drawn farm carts to find a campsite at Glentui. They slept by the river and Ngaio woke to the ecstatic joy of discovering the splendour of native birds celebrating the arrival of the dawn in such an beautiful location.

This was her country, the land of her birth, and it drew her back again and again regardless of the phenomenal acclaim she received, particularly in the UK and the United States. Ngaio Marsh, a crime novelist, was a worldwide literary sensation. In 1949, in conjunction with Penguin Books, Collins released ten of her novels simultaneously. One million copies came onto the international market, a distinction only shared by George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Agatha Christie. On the 11th of June 1966, she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Marsh was also a hugely successful director of theatrical productions for over 30 years. At 77 she directed Henry V at the new James Hay Theatre in Christchurch. Bruce Mason, attending as a reviewer for The Listener, wrote to Ngaio and said that he was lost in admiration of much of it. To those who knew her, particularly within theatrical circles, she was a loving and extremely generous woman.

Dr Joanna Drayton has produced a subtle yet exquisite portrait of this extraordinary woman. Her descriptions of Ngaio the fashionable personality in Knightsbridge are as evocative as those of Ngaio the young artist holding exhibitions in an upstairs room with no door other than a rickety fire escape, or Ngaio the girl sleeping outside at her parents under the stars. Drayton effortlessly weaves together the development of Ngaio's novels and characters with her theatrical work, her friendships and her upbringing. She reveals the personality of this global celebrity as well as her achievements. It is more a homage than a biography, and rightly so. This book places Marsh firmly at the forefront of New Zealand's creative endeavours.

Reviewed by Wheldon Curzon-Hobson

This book offers a valuable insight into the lives of twelve pioneer women who suffered, endured and triumphed in New Zealand.

Their journey by boat from Europe to New Zealand was a long and sometimes perilous one. The European explorers had previously been certain that their destination existed, mainly because they abhorred a vacuum, and couldn’t believe there could be such a vast expanse of ocean without the existence of a great land. Some also believed that without a land mass south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the world would be tipped upside down, while others were fearful they would burn up whilst crossing the equator, a myth finally dispelled by the Portuguese voyaging around Africa.

Dutchmen Willem Jansvoon discovered Australia and Able Tasman discovered New Zealand, although Tasman thought New Zealand was a promontory of Terra Australis and, as a consequence, interest in New Zealand languished for more than a century because it was considered part of the rather inhospitable Australia.

Captain James Cook put that to right, sailing his ship The Endeavour around New Zealand, discovering an extraordinarily beautiful land that has been termed God’s Own. It became a colony of the British Empire, and thousands came to seek their fortune, or to escape the harshness of their home countries.

Much has been written of the immigration to New Zealand, however the stories of women are still not prominent in published literature. Over the Wide and Trackless Sea, written by acclaimed historian Megan Hutching, provides us with a valuable insight into the lives of twelve of these pioneer women.

Their stories are wonderfully varied, including the privileged of Wellington, the landed gentry of Canterbury, gum diggers and whalers. They are mostly stories of hardship and hard work, of armed conflict and the loss of children. But they are also the stories of wonderful accomplishments and much love and friendship.

Woven together they make compelling reading and provide a multi-layered perspective of the colonial history of New Zealand.

Reviewed by Wheldon Curzon-Hobson

It was an inspired choice that Ranginui Walker was commissioned to write this book. He successfully places the extraordinary character of master carver Paki Harrison into an historical, cultural, academic and political context, whilst never letting us forget that this almost mythical genius is very much a man with his personal conflicts, successes and devotion.

Kaupapa Māori is a term used to describe a plan of action, expressing the aspirations and particular Māori values and principles. Throughout history it has meant the values and plans of action decided by Māori, or the values and action plans which express a set of deeper cultural values and worldview. Today Kaupapa Māori is often used as a strategy, or a plan of action to allow Māori to find a voice, particularly within academic institutions. It is also used in relation to transformation and cultural liberation.

For Paki Harrison, a man well versed in tradition, and priviledged in his receiving of the knowedge of history, carving and bushcraft, Kaupapa Māori is central to his work and existence. Whenever approached to create, he would discuss and research the history of the people of the land, their tribal affiliations, and the purpose of the work within the social and political environment.

His questions were at their most searching when invited to Te Awamutu College to work on Te Otawhao. Saddened and challenged by the sight of Māori young people on the streets, those who had been failed by their elders and the education system, he recruited fourteen young men and seventeen young women with no educational qualifications for on the job training for the marae project.

Harrison so believed in this project that he accepted the work without a salary, just the provision of a basic house, food and petrol. It is a story of resourcefulness, working on a dump site to construct a magnificent structure with extraordinary carving and art that inspired a community and provided skills for alienated school dropouts.

This book may be about one brilliant man, but through his life, art and battles, Walker offers an invaluable insight into the treasures of New Zealand and a way of seeing the world that will inspire and challenge readers.

Reviewed by Wheldon Curzon-Hobson

God knows, this could have all ended in tears.

A revisionist history of Oz? Written by a man whose prose Niles Crane would reject as pretentious, with a Political Point to make? Playing firmly to the US East Coast Anglophile Literature crowd? Aw, please. We'll take the original MGM musical and leave it at that, thanks. Oz ain't broke, so why try to fix it?

Except that like its unlikeable, determined heroine, Wicked somehow succeeds. That's partly because of the musical they made, burning up Broadway and everywhere else. And partly because it's just very good.

Perhaps the Oz of the book and the MGM musical (they're both referenced here) was just propaganda, spun by the winning side...

In an Oz where the Wizard is a horrifying tyrant, the yellow brick road is an abandoned civic project and Munchkins are short through malnutrition not midget-dom, a strange green girl grows up asking a lot of awkward questions about how Oz really works. Through a troubled childhood, radical college years and eventual nervous breakdown, the witch Elphaba is an existential heroine with a mean streak and unquenchable moral outrage. One man's freedom fighter, after all, is another man's Witch.

It's a grim, bitter tale that refuses to make anything easy for Elphaba or the reader. But for all its cynical tone, this isn't a book that explains Oz away or dismisses it as a worthless fantasy. In fact, you'll never read a book that takes Oz more seriously. One of the book's great achievements is that, bleak and surly as it is, it still somehow presents the Oz we all knew from the film. It's a trick so cleverly done that's almost like one of the Wizard's illusions. There's still witchcraft and wonder in Oz, and the steely adult angle just serves to bring the hard-won magic forth.

When Dorothy turns up at the end as a kind of unstoppable Nemesis, it's halfway between raw parody and high tragedy. Maguire writes her just like Judy Garland played her, and then some. You won't know whether to grieve or giggle.

For those who like their chocolate bitter and their fairylands rangey and tough, this is a great read. And after all, you already know the ending...