OFF THE SHELF: SEPTEMBER 2024

Warsaw Tales, Selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Oxford University Press, 12th September 2024)

This is a terrific decision of OUP, an anthology of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital of Warsaw. If you’ve been to Poland recently you already know how vigorously the country has bounced since the end of the Cold War, whether it’s being overtaken at high speed by businessmen in flashy German cars or experiencing 5G in a tech hub like Wroclaw that makes even London look arthritic. In other words it might not be what you saw on that Krakow city break you took even ten years ago. Poland is moving too fast.

Where Warsaw is concerned it’s about almost total destruction by the Nazis, horrific violence against the Jewish population, the Ghetto uprising. This is foregrounded by hundreds of years of being pn one side or another of changing borders and even a Swedish invasion in the mid-17th century. Latterly, the heavy hand of the Soviet experiment.

But ‘latterly’, if we are being honest, now means since 1989: 35 years of transformation.

As one protagonist cries out at the bar, ‘Just as that bushy isle in the middle of the Vistula goes under water every year and then rises to the surface again, so our Old Town has more than once sunk in disaster but has always floated to the top…’

Beginning in 1911 with Boleslaw Prus' Apparitions, the collected stories provide a chronological account of the city's tumultuous and dramatic history. It would be the perfect book to read in concert with a visit, featuring a wide variety of authors including Boleslaw Prus, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Ludwik Hering, Zofia Petersowa, Marek Hlasko, Kazimierz Orlos, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, Zbigniew Mentzel, Olga Tokarczuk, and Krzysztof Varga.

Translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Univ, 1980) is a renowned translator of numerous Polish novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Murder on Family Grounds by Susan Rowland (Chiron, 2024)

The author (Pembroke 1981) is on a roll, this the third in a series called the Mary Wandwalker Mystery Series. In the first, from 2022, we met Wandwalker, an Oxford alumna, as a novice detective hired to chaperone a younf American to an Oxford Summer School about ancient Celts, which quickly becomes a murder intrigue. In the second, from 2023, our nobel protagonist shoots off to Los Angeles to rescue a medieval alchemy scroll stolen from an Oxford college. In this the third mystery, we find out about Mary’s memory of an unwanted pregnancy while up at Oxford, a posh family called the Falconers who are being murdered, the re-surfacing of her child, once given up for adoption but now a policeman, a Russian spy of the distant past and an Oligarch now front and centre. It’s a case of skulduggery with a Russian twist, rooted in the confrontation of memory. Oxford is heavily in the frame across the series, a reminder perhaps of how deeply it inserts itself in memory and crime fiction.

Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape by Carwyn Graves (Calon, 2024)

In Tir – the Welsh word for ‘land’ – writer and ecologist Carwyn Graves (Worcester, 2011) takes us on a tour of seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountain pasture, and the rhos, or wild moorland. By diving deep into the history and ecology of each of these landscapes, we discover that Wales, in all its beautiful variety, is at base just as much a human cultural creation as a natural phenomenon: its raw materials evolved alongside the humans that have lived here since the ice receded. In our modern era of climate concerns and polarised debates on land use, diet and more, it matters that we understand the world we are in and the roads we travelled to get here. By exploring each of these key landscapes and meeting the people who live, work and farm in them, Tir offers hope for a better future; one with stunningly beautiful, richly biodiverse landscapes that are ten times richer in wildlife than they currently are, and still full of humans working the land.

Blue Jerusalem by Kit Kowol (Oxford University Press, 12 September, 2024)

This is a terrific book that shoots profound echoes across the bows of today’s defence conversation in Britain while bringing alive the intensely complex, always political detail of all the decisions that were made by the Conservative party to win World War Two. While the book is billed by its author (Univ, 2009, DPhil and early teaching both at Oxford) as ‘The untold story of how Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party envisioned Britain's post-war future,’ the book is so much more.

One broad theme that is simply not understood these days was the politics behind rearmament during the 1930s and 40s. There were numerous leftwing fantasies of a people’s army that at their fringe toppled over into right-wing fantasies of total mobilization. Even the Etonian George Orwell expressed his own version of this, a genteel notion that every rural worker would have a rifle hanging behind the door of their hovel. Behind the left was a vision of classlessness and even revolution. The Tories hastened instead to build tanks and bombers, high-tech weaponry that could cow the enemy into submission and compensate for a lack of raw numbers when it came to population. Within the narrative occur rich detours, such as early aviation pioneer Noel Pemberton Billing, one of the founders of Supermarine, the maker of the Spitfire and proof of concept of the high technology argument plus a handful of public school elites to pilot them, instead of a massive standing army that hearkened the end of the Tory way of life with its still alive idea of squirarchy and privilege. In the heat of war Pemberton Billing designed a radical slip-wing fighter aircraft that would carry an unmanned craft on top, despatched like a missile deep into enemy Germany. Like a drone or a glide bomb.

Consider just that detail.  We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't. We all know that Churchill wanted to bring America into the war and also save the Empire. That’s a hollow, lazy shorthand, and Kit shows instead the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world.

From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back-to-the-land, Blue Jerusalem reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as their Labour and left-wing opponents in their wartime plans for a post-war world. Equally, Churchill was a pragmatist and come the end of the war was adept at appearing to agree with multiple constituents within his own party while focusing on broad lines of engagement with the opposition where there was a clear dividing line of difference, ‘notably over public ownership.’ One wonders if anyone in the 2024 Conservative party has the bandwidth to read and think deeply about future identities, but they could do worse than start here. Then, as now, there were numerous intellectual traditions that comprised the Conservative mindset, ‘including Conservative internationalism, Milnerite social imperialism, Baldwinite Tory progressivism, rural anti-modernism, and classical liberalism, to name just a few.’

The Coming Healthcare Revolution by Paul Kesserow (John Wiley & Sons, October 2024)

The Anatomy of a Turnaround by Paul Kusserow (McGraw Hill, 2023). 

The author (Oriel, 1985) is much respected among healthcare business leaders in the US, and the investor community around him who did so well out of his leadership and turnaround of Amedisys. We wanted to mention both his books here – the second from late 2023 describes his attention to the workforce and the customers of Amedisys, a huge, private healthcare provider in America. Central to the turnaround, which was ultimately very successful, was a change in software. Instead of seeking to impose a solution Mr Kusserow carefully consulted his workforce and opted unexpectedly for a non-in house package, but it worked because it had buy-in. The second big thing he says reflects his career start at McKinsey, the consulting giant. He explains how most consultants at McKinsey are aggressively forced out after as little as two years, yet the company has succeeded in celebrating its alumni to the point where they have become a formidable future network of intelligence and support. Copying this general approach, at Amedisys he very carefully went after the thousands of former employees, to find that many were keen to return when told that the company was changing for the better. That’s a powerful insight because a returning employee is more quickly integrated and often more productive. ‘Alumni rule’, he says. Well, we raise a glass to that insight at Oxford!  He says of the forthcoming, October 2024 volume: ‘I just completed another book. The Coming Healthcare Revolution is a macroeconomic analysis of the U.S. healthcare system, the world's largest industry, and the forces now at work which will drive its transformation in the next 5 years.’

Sailing to the Heart of Japan by Nicolas Coghlan (Seaworthy, 2024)

Nicholas Coghlan (Queen’s, 1973) and partner Jenny Coghlan (nee Kirby, Wolfson, 1973) exude a supremely venturesome spirit by undertaking the most amazing voyage from New Zealand to Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Guam. It’s a case of all aboard the Bosun Bird, a 27-foot sailing yacht but with Japan as their main destination. In one sense a delightful travel narrative intelligently guided by Nicholas, a diplomat who originally studied modern languages at Oxford; the book also offers a very original perspective of Japan seen from tiny marinas and harbours approached from the South and then from Kyushu through the Inland Sea to Onomichi on Honshu. We estimate that only a tiny fraction of Japanese would recognise some of these place names, never mind the rest of us. The narrative is always very real, intimate and immediate and supplemented by terrific photos that capture the vagaries of the ocean, weather maps that detail typhoons dodged or encountered. Nick’s travel premise rests on his father refusing to visit Japan because of his experience of World War Two. Now we encounter a delightful generation of Japanese, some of whom admit that the entire sequence from 1930 to 1945 is more or less brushed over at school (‘History for us starts again in 1945, with the Bomb…’). What never changes is the insularity of Japan and it is anchored here in real tragedy, as fellow sailor Chinami goes missing feared drowned, having previously talked to the authors about his habit of going to bed at night on his yacht and sleeping through, apparently not at all familiar with the need to keep periodic watch for large ships. This, as so much else in the book, is offered as evidence of Galapagos Syndrome, the idea that Japan is so large and self-sufficient, often from design, that it often eludes the rest of the world. It might not be quite as obvious if you fly into Tokyo surrounded by other English-speakers, but it’s abundantly clear from this volume. A lot of what takes place might suggest a superior culture – whether in politeness or in the scene where a lost wallet is diligently returned to Jenny when on the yacht, by a female police officer, who has made real enquiries to figure out the owner. You won’t get that in London.