Interview with James Crawford, author of The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World
James Crawford, author of The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World recommends some fantastic books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out James's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history.
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The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World
In this book James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point: that we are entering the endgame of a process that began thousands of years ago, when we first started dividing up the earth.
Beginning with the earliest known marker which denoted the end of one land and the beginning of the next, Crawford follows the story of borders into our fragile and uncertain future - towards the virtual frontiers of the internet, and the shifting geography of a world beset by climate change. In the process, he travels to many borders old and new: from a melting border high in the glacial landscapes of the Austrian-Italian Alps to the only place on land where Europe and Africa meet; from the artist Banksy's 'Walled Off Hotel' in the conflict-torn West Bank to the Sonoran Desert and the fault lines of the US/Mexico border.
Combining history, travel and reportage, The Edge of the Plain explores how borders have grown and evolved to take control of our landscapes, our memories, our identities and our destinies. As nationalism, climate change, globalisation, technology and mass migration all collide with ever-hardening borders, something has to give. And Crawford asks, is it time to let go of the lines that divide us?
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Easons €28.00
Book Depository €17.02
Waterstones £20.00
Wordery $18.99
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Very hard to pick just one, as there are so many great examples. But here is a book that really stood out for me – Arundhati Roy’s My Seditious Heart. After being catapulted to global fame when her novel ‘The God of Small Things’ won the Booker Prize, Arundhati then spent the next two decades writing a series of remarkable political essays which are collected in this one (rather beautiful) volume. The essays cover all the major issues of the twenty first century world – war, migration, religion, climate change, nuclear weapons, colonialism – and they reveal a wealth of passionate and original thinking.
Review From Book Depository
The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable' John Berger
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time
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In a similar vein – although a much slimmer volume – is Zadie Smith’s Intimations. Written during the early months of lockdown, it features six essays responding to the global crisis. Although short, it contains a whole universe of acute insights on suffering, race, creativity and isolation. It’s wonderful.
My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction
My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her twenty year journey from the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things to the extraordinary The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: a journey marked by compassion, clarity and courage. Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites.
In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from 'The End of Imagination', which begins this book, to 'My Seditious Heart', with which it ends.
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Book Depository €27.11
Waterstones £21.99
Wordery $29.67
Intimations: Six Essays
From the critically acclaimed author of Feel Free, Swing Time, White Teeth and many more
'There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those - the year isn't half-way done. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.'
Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.
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Book Depository €6.52
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Wordery $7.84
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under A White Sky offers a brilliant – and slightly terrifying – look into the future of humanity, by exploring the challenges we face in attempting to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Her take is that human history over the last ten thousand years has been about working against, rather than with nature. Our exploitation of the world’s resources and biodiversity has created a range of imbalances, and in our attempts to fix those imbalances in the present day, we often create even more. The ‘White Sky’ of the title is a reference to what may be a last-ditch adaptation to global warming – scientists exploring the possibility of shooting diamond dust into the stratosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect, turning the sky from blue to white in the process.
Review From Book Depository:
The author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: after doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?
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Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Elizabeth Kolbert has become one of the most important writers on the environment. Now she investigates the immense challenges humanity faces as we scramble to reverse, in a matter of decades, the effects we've had on the atmosphere, the oceans, the world's forests and rivers - on the very topography of the globe.
In Under a White Sky, she takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave desert; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a 'super coral' that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth, changing the sky from blue to white.
One way to look at human civilisation, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperilled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
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Book Depository €17.92
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Wordery $11.33
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Roald Dahl’s Boy. I think this was the first non-fiction book that I read by myself - I was probably around eight or nine years old, and it was thrilling to see how Dahl applied all his skills and techniques as a novelist to a memoir. I genuinely think it changed my perception of how you can tell a story, in particular a real-life story, and how broad the possibilities were in where non-fiction writing could take you.
Review From Book Depository:
From his own life, of course! As full of excitement and the unexpected as his world-famous, best-selling books, Roald Dahl's tales of his own childhood are completely fascinating and fiendishly funny. Did you know that Roald Dahl nearly lost his nose in a car accident? Or that he was once a chocolate candy tester for Cadbury's? Have you heard about his involvement in the Great Mouse Plot of 1924? If not, you don't yet know all there is to know about Roald Dahl. Sure to captivate and delight you, the boyhood antics of this master storyteller are not to be missed!
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Boy: Tales of Childhood
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Book Depository €8.47
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Wordery $8.38
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper, every single time. Reading on a phone or a kindle seems such a meagre experience by comparison. I was once at an event where Neil Gaiman was the keynote speaker, and he compared the book – in the form of a series of bound pieces of paper – to a shark. Sharks, he said, had achieved such a perfection of form hundreds of millions of years ago, that they had barely changed or evolved since. They didn’t need to. Books are the same. You can innovate or imitate, but still nothing beats the feel of a book in your hands, the experience of carrying a whole world in such a wonderfully tactile object.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
The Edinburgh Bookshop in Bruntsfield is my local and it is an inspiring place. Small and perfectly formed, it has incredibly knowledgeable and passionate booksellers, a beautifully curated front of store, and is constantly winning awards for being the ‘best bookshop’ – both in Scotland and the UK. What more can you ask for from a bookshop?
Many thanks to James for recommending some fantastic books! Please don't forget to check out James's book The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Canongate Books Ltd (The Edge of the Plain), Haymarket Books (My Seditious Heart), Penguin Books Ltd (Intimations), Vintage Publishing (Under a White Sky), Penguin Random House Children's UK (Boy).
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