Review of Burning Questions – Margaret Atwood

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays — funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient — which seek answers to Burning Questions such as:

Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
How can we live on our planet?
Is it true? And is it fair?
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe.

Burning Questions

Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus

Supplied by Penguin Random House New Zealand

Reviewed by Stephen Litten

What do you do when you’ve had a long career as a writer and are now considered a national treasure? You could do worse than bundle together collections of short non-fiction you’ve generated over the years. In Atwood’s case, this is her third collection of musings, reviews and the like. This volume covers the period 2004-2021. The previous two are Second Words (1960-1982) and Moving Targets (1983-2004).

Burning Questions is divided into five sections, each approximately three years, with the material being a selection of reviews, obituaries (which are called for when you start to outlive other writers), and general musings on all manner of things. Thus, we have musings on Anne of Green Gables and the life of the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Alice Munro (a Canadian staple), Scrooge, writing clinics for Canadian first Nations and much else besides.

I found myself dipping into these writings more frequently than I imagined. Atwood has been a paid writer since 1960, and obviously has learned a lot about the craft. She has also lived through a period of massive social change, as well as the usual personal changes that go with living for over 80 years. And as someone who has experienced three quarters of her lifespan, there’s been a lot of change that is grist to the writer’s mill.

I enjoyed this collection. Atwood is a good writer, and much of this collection has snippets of humour reaching out to the reader. These short works make me want to read the books reviewed, visit the places mentioned, dig up the social research discussed. In short, Margaret makes me want to read more. Which is exactly what an author should make you want to do.

Get a copy of Burning Questions. And the other two. Now!

I thank Jerome Buckleigh at Penguin Random House for the review copy.

Review of Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science – Richard Dawkins

At a time when science can seem complex and remote, it has a greater impact on our lives, and to the future of our planet, than ever before. It really matters that its discoveries and truths should be clearly and widely communicated. That its enemies, from the malicious to the muddled, the self-deluding to the self-interested, be challenged and exposed. That science should be brought out of the laboratory, taken into the corridors of power and defended in the maelstrom of popular culture. No one does this better than Richard Dawkins.

In bringing together his forewords, afterwords and introductions to works by some of the leading thinkers of our age – Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Wolpert – and a selection of his reviews, both admiring and critical, of a wide range of scientific and other works, Books do Furnish a Life celebrates the writers who communicate the ideas of science and the natural world in both fiction and non-fiction. It celebrates the courage of those who write about their experiences of escaping religion and embracing rationality, of protecting the truths of science and analytical rigour against charlatanry and obfuscation.

Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science

Richard Dawkins

Bantam Press

Supplied by Penguin Random House New Zealand

Reviewed by Stephen Litten

When you get as successful as Richard Dawkins, you get invited to review books, write forewords, and get to interview other celebrity scientists. Dawkins has been around so long that this is the third such anthology (the others being The Devil’s Chaplain, and Science in the Soul). That it is number three reinforces the reality that Dawkins is a good writer.

Books Do Furnish a Life is divided into six sections, each starting with an interview or dialogue between Dawkins and someone germsin to the theme at hand. For example, Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with Dawkins about scientists with apparent illogical beliefs. The six categories are; writing science, celebrating nature, exploring humanity, supporting scepticism, interrogating faith, and evangelizing evolution. The latter is because Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist.

Dawkins gives the provenance of all the essays, which span a period of about 15 years. Most of them are supportive of authors, or champions of other fields in science. Only a few of the review essays are negative with one particularly biting review of a book where the author dug himself into a hole, then kept digging. Its sharpness is akin to finding an acid drop in the after dinner mints. Dawkins also does the favour of introducing a new to me webcomic, Jesus and Mo, which lampoons theology in a weekly four frame strip.

At over 400 pages, this is not a quick read. But due to the shortness of the essays (about 50 essays averaging 8 pages per), it’s easy to dip in and out of the book. This one is staying in my collection, and I wish to thank Jerome Buckleigh at Penguin Random House for the review copy.

Review of Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami

‘I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.’

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

Men Without Women

Haruki Murakami

translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Harvill Secker

Supplied by Penguin Random House New Zealand

Reviewed by Stephen Litten

Men Without Women is a collection of seven shorter form stories (which mostly qualify as novelettes and one short story), one of which is also called Men Without Women. Both Goossen and Gabriel have translated Murakami before, and Harvill Secker seems to be his usual English publisher.

As with the majority of Murakami’s output, these are contemporary stories set in Japan – what a surprise. We have a widower with a new driver, a caregiver who provides extra services, two friends who speak the others dialect, and so forth. We get to see a snippet of the protagonists’ world and sometimes a resolution.

Generally, these stories are an exploration of relationships, mostly couples but not always romantic or sexual. With the title story, we have a man who is contacted by the survivors of his past partners. He wonders why they feel compelled to contact him. We have a man who remembers his name and very little else.

The pacing of these stories is good, with the ending coming naturally. Nothing feels rushed. The stories work, and the translations are good; nothing jarred, or sounded like it was delivered by another voice.

I apologise if this review seems a little short, but this is first anthology 000ve reviewed in quite a while and so am completely out of practice with them. That said, I enjoyed this collection and strongly recommend it. I also thank Penguin Random House for the review copy.