Easter Book Reviews by Chloe Blades

Politics: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams 

Is this the start of the end of Meta? Of course not, that’s ridiculous.

Meta could be found guilty of initiating Pizza Gate and sacrificing children and people still wouldn’t pry themselves off of it.

But now, thanks to the former Director of Facebook’s Global Public Policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams, there has to be enough evidence to prove Zuckerberg single handedly fucked America and a myriad other things (teen mental health, for example) and colluded with immoral governments for his profitable gain.

It turns out Sheryl Sandberg is the antithesis of ‘lean-in’ and likes to send her staff on errands to purchase expensive underwear and then invite them over for dinner to try it on with her.

Mark Zuckerberg, unsurprisingly, said that terrorism, after an attack on the US, was good for Facebook because it drove engagement. Worse, though, are the final chapters that document far more sinister and dangerous decisions made by the senior Facebook team, which have been proven to have caused multiple deaths, rapes and suicide.

This is one of the most baffling exposés out right now, one that is both despairing yet hopeful because Wynn-Williams has been brave enough to put her life on the line to write.

She’s recently been silenced by an interim ruling that refrains her from “amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments” about Meta (silencing a woman, how original).

So we have to do the publicity for her and I’m here for it.

Travel Writing: A Place of Tide by James Rebanks

Rebanks, famous for his bestselling book The Last Shepherd, opens this biography musing on the end of the world: “I imagine the last human on earth being a woman on a rocky shoreline”.

This woman, he imagines, would be someone like Anna Måsøy.

This seventy-something matriarch lives on the island of Fjærøy, a tiny, usually uninhabited island, in the Vega archipelago on Norway’s west coast.

She spends 3-4 months every year in solitude tending to the nests of wild eider ducks, in the hope that she can rejuvenate this once flourishing colony and her family’s ancient tradition.

She’s an “unbreakable” woman with knowledge and strength that forces Rebanks to reckon with having been “a poor husband, father, brother, and son”.

While a review in The Guardian argues that this book is not served better by our author’s journey of “self-improvement”, I disagree.

It is a testament to the power of solitude, women and change.

You won’t learn how to collect eiderdown feathers for a sumptuous duvet, but you will bear witness to how one woman fought for something history almost forgot, who occasionally left her husband and children behind for a remote island, and used her bare hands and an intermittent generator to battle through storms, killer minks, and uninhabitable nests.

Thanks to Rebanks’ masterful ability to capture the human spirit, Anna is immortalised in history as one of Norway’s infamous “duck women”.

Memoir: Everything / Nothing / Someone by Alice Carriere 

Alice Carriere had an upbringing surrounded by grandeur and privilege in a three-story artist’s dream house in Greenwich Village, which had it not been for the loneliness and neglect within it would have been enviable.

Growing up she was admitted to multiple mental institutions and had taken a smorgasbord of drugs to placate the dissociative disorder, psychosis and anxiety that stemmed from her dysfunctional, wildly eccentric, upbringing. 

Her father, the film director Mathieu Carrière, was a protégé of Gilles Deleuze, and was stimulated by boundary bending, inappropriate debates with his daughter and making experimental art with her (like having her ride naked on a horse for his friend to film).

Her mother, renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, was remote and detached and spent most of her time channelling her own trauma into her famously enormous canvases.

 Alice’s upbringing was a conflation of art and family and, albeit an example of the ways it can really fuck you up, it’s a raw, stunning example of how one can reclaim a broken mind and rebuild a life with a semblance of stability through art.

It was wonderfully articulated and a compelling read into a unique life.

History / Essays: The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka Press, $35)

At the PANZ Design awards last year I discovered the process behind book cover design.

The design briefs outlined the ways in which the cover (and all the other components) corresponds to the context of the book.

Having now read this collection of essays the beautiful cover (always judge a book by its cover) makes absolute sense.

Expanding on the definition of a Chthonic Cycle, “relating to or living in the underworld,” Cruickshank spans the underworld, literally going undersea to inspect the minutiae of the seabed, from oysters and pearls to ambergris and sperm whales, and then ventures above ground to scrutinise their relationships with earth, history and people.

The myriad layers of detail create a collage of information, which in turn tells a story that is both compelling and jaw-dropping that it could easily be mistaken as fiction, which is a testament to the way Una weaves a captivating tale out of complex facts.

In the essay A Little Spark May Yet Remain, for example, electricity is entwined with the attempted suicide of Mary Wollenstonecraft, doctors dissecting bodies in the name of resuscitation research, and how had it not been for experiments with electricity and the founding of the “Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned” in 1774, Frankenstein might never have been written.

The collage on the cover of coral, stones and fossils, electricity, pearl-related imagery and ‘a small jet amulet shaped like a bear’, ‘forty pillar of brilliant glass’, and lego, captures perfectly the mighty soul of this book.