FEAR: A Cultural History
by Joanna Bourke
Virago, £9.99
We are all afraid. Though war no longer threatens most of us, our times “are characterised by more nebulous anxiety states, focusing on fatigued environments of flesh and fellowship. Cancer and crime, pain and pollution: these fears isolate us.” Bourke traces the American and British experience of these and older fears from the 19th century to now. The field is fertile and Bourke, a professor in London, ranges from the arcane — aichmophobia, the fear of sharp objects — to the common, such as cancer.
The prose can be dense and difficult. “The narrativity approach implies that there is no body to the emotions at all: everything is reduced to discourse. One of the problems with this approach is that it imposes an absolute plasticity to the individual, always in thrall to disciplining discourses and institutions.” By contrast, when she is trying to be accessible Bourke always alliterates and can become inane: “Danger dallies in everyday environs.” Can danger “dally”?
We miss, more importantly, any sustained attempt to explain why fear, like love or hate, is a universal human emotion and, as far as we know, always has been. How and why does it help our species to survive? Nor does Bourke ask whether fear in the West is the same as fear in the East. What, for example, do the leaders of Iran fear? If nothing, why? This book is timely, though, and addresses a human emotion that, as it has our past, will shape what we become.
ELECTRIC UNIVERSE: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World
by David Bodanis
Abacus, £7.99
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What is electricity, and how did it come to enable the modern world? These questions have both simple and complex answers. This book, clearly pitched at the popular science market, addresses the simple end. Bodanis concentrates on the people who brought us electricity, rather than the science. Here are Joseph Henry, the “strapping, rawboned American” who engaged with electromagnetism and, around 1830, invented the telegraph. There are also routine anecdotes about Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and Alan Turing.
Bodanis’s style is more fireside chat than podium. “It’s those torn-off bits — electrons — that, as we saw, roll forward inside a wire, creating an electric current. That’s it.” The phrase “our australopithecine ancestors” who, by the way, “would have noticed abrupt bursts of lightning”, is as demanding as it gets. Sometimes the search for the simple goes too far. Electricity, apparently, is like “two Olympian armwrestlers” — is this, after synchronised swimming, the latest addition? — “whose struggle is unnoticed because their straining hands barely move”.
The notes are the most stimulating part of this book. The acknowledgements are perhaps the most saccharine yet written, if you’re feeling charitable, or the most nauseating if you’re not. But as informative and easy reading, this is a good introduction to its subject. If a child asks “what’s electricity, and why’s it important?” send them here.
THE EXPLORER’S DAUGHTER: A Young Englishwoman Rediscovers her Arctic Childhood
by Kari Herbert
Penguin, £8.99
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The author’s father was a polar explorer, Wally Herbert, whose wife Marie shared his passion. When their daughter, Kari, was ten months old, they took her with them to live for two years with the Eskimos in Greenland, “the largest island on earth after Australia” and yet one which “barely seems to exist at all”. Kari went back when she was 9. As an adult, three years ago she returned again. This book is the result. “It was not the ice that I remembered; it was the . . . blue-white blinding light. And then I caught the inexpressibly subtle scent of fresh snow.”
Although much has stayed the same, she found that much has changed. Greenland’s main airport is “now a modern complex housing two curio shops, a duty-free outlet”. This book’s fault is that there is too much of such mundane detail, and not enough of the deeper things. Why are the indigenous Eskimos as ravaged by alcohol as their ice is by jetskis and US bomber bases? Why are the innocent children of Herbert’s childhood now inflicting sexual abuse on their children?
Herbert has a fine sensitivity to people, such as the “gentle bear of a Dane . . . whose life of teaching in Greenland had promoted a consistent affair with the bottle in whose warm forgetfulness he had perhaps lingered to avoid the pain of a too sensitive heart”. The author’s gift of empathy rides to the rescue of her book.