I recently read Non-Fiction

This summer has mostly been a bunch of non-fiction reading for me. Thomas Harding’s blood on the page It’s one of the most unique and interesting real-life crime books I’ve ever found. Photographer, writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw, an 86-year-old Allan Chappelow, was killed in June 2006 when he was beaten to death in his home in Hampstead, north London. It took police three days to find his body buried under four feet of paper. Harding describes Chappelow’s life, the investigation into his death, and the antecedents of the main suspect, Wang Yam, a Chinese dissident. The last part of the book contains the murder trial of Yam, the first to be held in modern British history. camera – that is, completely secret in the press without reporting the defense case. Speculation that such a trial was held is still completely banned. Despite the obvious limitations of this, Harding makes good use of the available background material to create an engaging account of a truly bizarre and unique case.

Charlie Gilmourren Featherhood it is a memory of birds, fathers, sons, and the bonds between them. Until recently, Gilmour was allegedly sentenced to life imprisonment by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and adopted in 16 years in London for violating disorder in protests over student enrollment in London. His biological father, writer, and anarchist Heathcote Williams abandoned Gilmour and his mother Polly Samson as a child. Gilmour’s attempts to revive his relationship towards the end of Heathcote’s life came at a time when he was planning to start a family with his wife, Yana, and was caring for an abandoned hangman named Benzene. ‘Featherhood’ is an elegantly written book that was mentioned last year on the “Best Books of 2020” charts and compared to another great memoir about nature by Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.

Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall It’s a book I’ve been wanting to read since I attended the Chiswick Book Festival’s Marshall Flag Conference in 2016, and it’s one of the most interesting events I’ve ever been to. There are relatively few books on geopolitics aimed at the general reader, and this works hard to explain how the geographies, natural resources, climates, lands, populations, and boundaries of different countries have a strategic impact on international relations. . Donald Trump’s presidency, the Brexit referendum and the global pandemic have occurred since the first release of ‘Prisoners of Geography’ in 2015, but otherwise almost all of its content is relevant even though it is not yet fully up to date. For example, the Afghanistan section has been a useful background reading in the context of recent events in the region. I’m looking forward to reading the recently published sequel to ‘The Power of Geography’.

Dani Shapiro’s legacy the author is a memoir about finding out in 2016 that his father was not his biological father after sending his DNA sample on a whim to Ancestry.com. The results showed that Shapiro was 52% Ashkenazi Jew and 48% European (French, English, Irish, German), 48% half of whom could not be explained European. Her memoir reflects on her Jewish identity — she grew up in a New Jersey Orthodox Jewish family — and reflects difficult ethical dilemmas about privacy in these matters. Since his parents were not alive, the search for Shapiro’s answers is not entirely easy. An interview with his mother a few years ago revealed that he was born in a fertility clinic in Philadelphia. Her biological cousin also used Ancestry.com and was able to identify her via Facebook, which meant Shapiro was able to track down her biological father, who donated sperm while working as a 22-year-old medical student at the clinic. In the early 1960s and thought no more, he was assured that he would remain anonymous at the time. We don’t know if any of Shapiro’s parents suspected that the clinic mixed sperm without their permission. Overall, I found this report very moving and thought-provoking, considering that millions of DNA tests have been sold in the United States, and about 2% of them have found a “Parentless Event.” This is to discover that hundreds of thousands of people are not what their biological parents thought they were, which means there are many more to tell in these stories.