26 Books

Pat Kirwan is a former NFL coach whose spells with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Phoenix Cardinals and New York Jets allow him to bring a real expertise to his punditry. His aim with this book is to help NFL fans get more out of watching the game by drawing their attention to some of the less obvious things that happen on the field.

Take Your Eye Off the Ball

Bill Cowher (Foreword)
Triumph Books (IL) 2010, Paperback, 225 pages, £10.83

It’s not a book for complete novices; Kirwan assumes a fair amount of knowledge of the sport but anyone beyond beginner level will find something useful here. I’ve been watching American football for 25 years but I still learned a lot from reading this.

This book is probably only for those who already have a reasonably good grasp of the music of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but those who do will find a brilliant analysis that gives some very familiar music a new fascination.

German Modernism

Walter Frisch
University of California Press 2007, Paperback, 332 pages, £20.95

Frisch starts with a wonderful analysis of the roots of German modernism in the music of Richard Wagner and the writings of his sometime disciple Friedrich Nietzsche. This includes an astounding couple of pages in which he disects the opening theme from Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal. It’s a theme that seems to be full of longing, and is quite unsettling and yet at the same time rather poised and noble. This is, as anyone who knows what the opera is about will immediately know, the opera in one five bar theme.

This is a wonderful book! Norman Lewis arrived in Naples in 1943 as an intelligence officer following the Allies’ successful invasion of the southern Italian peninsula, and this is the diary he kept while there. There’s a delightful irony shot through the entire book, and Lewis’s knowing and world-weary exasperation at the way the chain of command insisted on misunderstanding almost everything about life in Naples is to the fore on almost every page.

Naples ‘44

Norman Lewis
Eland Publishing Ltd 2002, Paperback, 192 pages, £10.99

I imagine that Lewis’s superiors thought that he had ‘gone native’, and in many ways I think he probably had. But, for all his love of Italy, its landscape and people, he could never come to terms with the petty corruption that made (and still makes) the country work.

The brain is what makes human beings such extraordinary animals but we still know surprisingly little about how it works. In The Tell-Tale Brain, V S Ramachandran, one of the world’s leading neurologists, sets out the state of contemporary neuroscience, focusing particularly on aesthetics, language and sight. The result is fascinating.

The Tell-Tale Brain

V. S. Ramachandran
William Heinemann 2011, Hardcover, 384 pages, £20.00

Neuroscience today, writes Ramachandran, is at the point where chemistry was when the Periodic Table was created. Huge amounts of progress have been made in recent decades and he expects to see great leaps in our understanding over the next few years.

Hannah Arendt’s book on what she consistently describes as the ’show trial’ of Adolf Eichmann made her famous, mainly for the subtitle she gave it – ‘A report on the Banality of Evil‘ – which has now passed into cliché. But it’s easy to forget that this idea – that mass murderers could be ordinary and, yes, banal people – was itself a profoundly uncomfortable one at the time.

Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)

Hannah Arendt
Penguin Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, £10.99

Perhaps it still is. One of the complaints levelled at Bruno Ganz’s astonishing portrayal of Hitler the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was that it ‘humanised’ the Führer. What ought to be the film’s triumphant achievement, to help us to understand that the monstrosity of Nazism was a human monstrosity, was seen as its greatest weakness. There has been, and continues to be, a romantic view of history that atrocities are carried out by monsters. If Nazism has taught us anything, it should be that its very much more complicated than that.

This book tells the story of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during the Third Reich, a period that had repercussions for them well into the 1980s. This remarkable orchestra have, in many people’s estimation, mine included, been the greatest orchestra in the world for the last century or more. I’ve heard them on numerous occasions, both in Berlin and elsewhere, and it is a singular experience. They produce a remarkable, rich, deep, oaken sound that thrills both in quiet passages and when they are in full cry. For the ideal example of their tone, try listening from about 3:00 to 3:36 in this recording of the second movement of Bruckner’s 5th Symphony with Herbert von Karajan conducting. Beautiful as it is under control like that, there is no more beautiful sound than the Berlin Philharmonic playing with abandon.

The Reich’s Orchestra

Misha Aster
Souvenir Press Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £20.00

Critics would say that they actually don’t do that, that they are always in too much control, and that their perfectionism is somehow wearying. I don’t see it that way. Even under Karajan, of whom much more in a moment, they produced a remarkably wild impression in concert, the music sounding like it was on the very edge of collapse.

Dan Gillmor is a journalist, journalism teacher, technology investor and one of the key people to read if you’re interested in how new tools are changing journalism and the media. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Dan sent me a copy. It’s also available for nothing from his website.

Mediactive

Dan Gillmor
Lulu.com 2010, Paperback, 204 pages, £10.50

Mediactive is a guidebook for navigating today’s fragmented media world, both as a consumer and as a producer. Within a couple of decades we’ve gone from a world in which being a media producer required enormous effort and investment to one in which it required only a little technical knowhow and an internet connection to today’s world, in which hundreds of millions of people have become media producers – on a tiny scale – without even thinking about it.

I like Spanish football a lot. I’ve seen Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao at home and seen Real Madrid play against Levante – Valencia’s second team. I find the footballing and fan culture fascinating, though I don’t know much about either. That’s where this book comes in.

Morbo

Phil ball
WSC Books Limited 2003, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

Philip Ball explores, chapter by chapter, the Spanish regions and their major clubs. All the time he searches for evidence of ‘morbo’, the almost untranslatable Spanish term that means, roughly, the passionate animosity between rival supporters.

There are plenty of fascinating stories here – from the sport’s birth in Spain thanks to Englishmen abroad to the often seedy backroom dealings over players, managers and even stadiums.

I have long thought that Marshall McLuhan was either full of shit or just stating the blindingly obvious. Having read The Medium is the Massage, I now realise that it’s a combination of the two.

The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

One element of his argument is that the things one communicates are in large part determined by the medium one uses. This is the blindingly obvious bit: the content of telephone conversations is different from the contents of Twitter conversations, the message of a piece of music different from the message of a billboard advertisement. Durr. However, I can’t get on board with idea that the message of a telephone conversation is the telephone. The only way this can be true is inside the mind of a media studies professor.

Revolution 1989 has been widely praised in the mainstream media, but I must say that I found it a disappointment, and certainly no match for Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism, which is strange given that Brown’s book had a far greater timescale to cover, and I wasn’t that bowled over by Brown’s book in any case.

Revolution 1989

Victor Sebestyen
Phoenix 2010, Paperback, 480 pages, £12.99

Like Brown, Sebestyen comprehensively demonstrates that the fall of communism occurred because of the weight of internal problems, contradictions that date back to the 1917 revolution itself, and in particular to Khrushchev’s refusal to continue Stalin’s hardline policies from 1956 onwards, and not due to US foreign policy. This is despite what I think is his desire to prove the opposite, but the only evidence he can really adduce to that effect is that Afghanistan was a drain on the Soviet economy and morale, and that the US provided some of the finance for the resistance.