OFF THE SHELF: DECEMBER 2024

Good Nature, The New Science of How Nature Improves our Health, by Kathy Willis (Bloomsbury, 2024)

The author is Principal of St Edmund Hall, and there is a colour plate in the book of a beautiful green wall within the college, that Kathy facilitated upon coming to Oxford having previously worked as a Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. There is no escaping the fact that it has been a great benefit to the college community.

But proving the benefit is rather harder than asserting the ‘fact’. Some readers may question why it’s necessary to prove everything that we already know by intuition, and I had that thought myself on some occasions while reading Good Nature.

But the science is not uninteresting and we’re led on a great journey that brings many riches. By the end, intuition is amplified rather than quashed.

I suspect some of us may have read in a Sunday paper about Japanese forest bathing. But this book walks us through an experiment that measures the levels of pinene, a volatile organic compound associated with coniferous forest, and isolates what it is and what it does for us. Interesting.

In a sense that’s the book. It starts on a personal note and doffs the right caps to people like the Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard ecology professor behind the now bedrock classic Biophilia (1984).

But then off we go on a great chase: diet, flowers (aesthetic, colour, shape, touch, perfume); the soundscape of everything from lapping waves to rustling leaves and why people universally prefer sweetly singing birds to screeching or cawing ones; the other benefits of trees (the chapter is actually called, ‘The proven benefits of Tree-Hugging’); the benefit of indoor greenery and what we are learning now about interior air quality (gulp -).

The obverse of everything the book points to is perhaps more worrying – what are the volatile organic compounds we breathe in from the urban landscape, or from a car interior? What are the chemicals released by domestic chemicals or commonly applied weed killer? These sorts of books are also being published amidst a broader, burgeoning public interest in chemicals and what they do to us. But with the holiday season in prospect I think this is the one to lift your spirits. Focus on nature – and perhaps also consider Jeremy Mynott’s The Story of Nature, A Human History (2024), a typically brilliant Yale University Press production that offers a cultural and intellectual history of the idea of nature. Hugely compatible with Good Nature, and consider them a brace of books ahead of a new year and Spring.

The Beating Heart The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ by Robin Choudhury (Zeus, 2024)

This book deserves to register, as I think it will over time, as a great classic.

For now, it is a beautifully designed and executed production by Zeus, right down to the vitalistic red fonts and end papers. The words are high art, conveying otherwise elusive, expansive material in ways that suggest enormous gestation over a whole career. And there is high art too, with copious illustrations and more art history than you would have reason to expect.

The author is a Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Oxford, and a practising cardiologist. He knows of what he writes. Yet it’s the art and culture that is most notable in this book.

There is an unforgettable Renaissance image by Caspar von Regensburg titled Frau Minne and the Suitor, in which the pains of unrequited courtly love are captured with black humour. Miss Minne stands in the middle wearing not much, while a suitor in front of her, already blood stained, literally offers her his heart as a physical sacrifice for unrequited love. All around the frame are the bleeding hearts of other suitors ‘subjected to a variety of mechanical abuses and torture: by piercing, cracking, squashing, sawing, burning and crushing underfoot.’ You can’t unsee it.

By then, just a quarter of the way into the book, we have already traversed the ancient world and the Medieval tendency towards both sacred and profane notions of the heart’s meaning, with the right nod to Aristotle (and others) who of course had ideas and theories about the physiology of the heart that were onto something but ‘wrong’.

Yet come page 67 and Thomas Aquinas, and the author notes that Aquinas had essentially alighted on three primal intuitions about the heart that haven’t changed since. One is that the heart is a prime mover – it operates autonomously, like a planet. Second, it has no conscious input; yet third, it is responsive, ‘as moved by the soul’ and we all know what it’s like when our hearts beat faster in response to fear or love or fright or exercise.

What then changed with modern science was a better and better understanding of the mechanisms behind the heart’s operation, allowing the most incredible medical science to flourish. Yet the basic ideas that Aquinas touched upon haven’t changed and whether you do or don’t think we have souls, the notion is deeply embedded in Western culture.

Later on we go to Mexico and ‘retablo’ muralists; and the book goes right outside these cultures to China and back again to research papers in the 1960s when pacemakers were on the cusp of being developed. There is science and art, culture and philosophy in equal weight here and at no point does the author lose control of his material despite tackling a subject that is almost as big as human history itself. A triumph.

When the Mapou Sings by Nadine Pinede (Candlewick Press, December 2024) . 

Out this month and billed also as young adult fiction, Nadine (St John’s, 1986) blends first love, political intrigue and magical realism with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.
Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream-a gift from the Mapou-tells Lucille to go to her village's section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life at risk.
Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society's elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer's son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again-this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille's new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about-and any chance of seeing her best friend again-as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.

Why Does Grandpa Walk So Slowly? By Yoav Tenembaum (Troubador, 2024)

Now we’re departing convention and diving down into a couple of titles aimed at children, first by Dr Tenembaum (St Antony’s, 1984). The story of a grandfather who walks very slowly. In his quest to know why he is so slow, why he walks so slowly, Grandpa asks his friends the turtle and the snail. Their answers are original and surprising. Afterwards, Grandpa decides to ask his four-years old grandson, Noam, who attributes his grandfather's slowness to something that startles Grandpa. Noam seems to have the right answer, and a final comment, which leaves the reader with food for thought. This is a story, humorous in tone and content, dwelling on a loving relationship between a grandfather and his grandson, and the latter's thought-provoking answers. It highlights the various perspectives one can have on a given issue and the importance of accepting the other as he or she is.

Flowerblock by Lanisha Butterfield (Penguin Random House Children's UK, 2024)

Just nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Illustration, this visually stunning children’s book radiates a positive message about the beauty of nature and the power of community. Butterfield, who works for the Bodleian Library, and illustrator Hoang Giang's picture book revolves around a plant which just keeps growing through the floors of a tower block.

When Jeremiah plants a packet of sunflower seeds, the very last thing he expects is for the vines and leaves to grow overnight and burst through the ceiling of his apartment!

As Jeremiah and his brother chase the magical plant up through the floors of their tower block home, they discover an array of curious neighbours who join in the adventure. But what could be waiting for them at the top of the building? And will Jeremiah find his voice to help the neighbours discover the true magic hidden within these sunflower seeds? Nature draws disparate communities and neighbours together.