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1 comments about Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (EasyRead Large Bold Edition).

1. Unfairly the author was deemed a disgrace during his school days and he burns with indignation over his treatment fifty years later. At twelve he went from Harrow to Winchester. His father had taken two farms, had no capital, and had given up his career as a lawyer. After Winchester Trollope returned to Harrow.
   
   When his mother wrote a book about her stay in the United States, it was a success. The family's pecuniary circumstances improved, but the boy remained friendless. DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS was the first of Mrs. Trollope's travel books. In her case politics was an affair of the heart.
   
   At Orley Farm the mother surrounded the family with moderate comforts. After two years the family decamped to Belgium to avoid creditors. Mrs. Trollope wrote novels while a son and her husband were dying of consumption. The author then hurried to London to assume a job at the Post Office. After the father's death, Mrs. Trollope moved back to England. The author's father had had a life of misery through no fault of his own, suffering a blighted ambition.
   
   Seven years later Anthony went to Ireland to work as a surveyor clerk for the Post Office. He met his wife there and married in 1844. In 1845 his first novel was finished. Two Irish novels and an historical novel were failures. He surveyed postal facilities in England and conceived of THE WARDEN story at Salisbury. It was begun in 1852. When it was published in 1855 there were notices of it in the press. It was not as great a failure as the others. He wrote BARCHESTER TOWERS in railway coaches as he traveled in them on Post Office business. The author's brother supplied the plot for DR. THORNE.
   
   To pursue his other career Trollope allotted himself so many pages a week. (This bit in the autobiography is famous.) He finished DR. THORNE on one day and started THE BERTRAMS the next. Trollope went to Egypt, to Scotland, to the West Indies for the Post Office. He created FRAMLEY PARSONAGE for CORNHILL MAGAZINE. John Everett Millais illustrated FRAMLEY PARSONAGE, THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON, PHINEAS FINN, and RACHEL RAY.
   
   Anthony Trollope settled at Waltham Cross and in 1866 became a member of the Garrick Club and subsequently a number of other clubs. His comments on other novelists of the 19th century are interesting. He claims authors and critics should not be in the same company. In 1867 THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET was brought out in monthly installments. That same year Trollope resigned from the Post Office. Evidently Anthony Trollope inherited his mother's stamina.

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3 comments about Shooting History: A Personal Journey.

1. Jon Snow's account of his life as a reporter is an intoxicating read. Jon retraces his steps through the maelstrom of world events that have occurred in the past three decades. Situated on the cusp of each wave of history as it breaks Jon has had the enviable opportunity of bearing witness to cataclysmic episodes in time. Geographically we are taken from Chile to Washington, Rome to Uganda, and Afghanistan to Vietnam. Politically, we gain insights into the manoeuvrings within the Vatican, the Iron Lady's motivations behind her firm hand on the Falklands, the freeze and thaw of US Soviet relations, and its horrific and disturbing fallout in countries as far apart as Grenada and Somalia, and as complicated as Iran, Iraq and Israel. Personally, Jon describes audiences with key historical figures who had their hand in the shaping the "new world order"; an order we get the impression he perhaps wishes he had had more of a hand in moulding himself.
   
   Jon's writing is fresh, lucid and honest. He is inquisitive, confident and energetic, something of a rogue, a little reckless. At times he is unpolished and lacks tact but this makes his writing more generous. Jon honestly recounts facts and observations, understating his own bravery and making little of the sacrifices he made with regards to his family in favour of his job. However, the book is far from dispassionate, and this is evident when it comes to world events. Naturally, as a voyager on the cutting edge of history Jon sees the links and connections, with the benefit of hindsight he sees time fold and simply repeat itself as if, as he profoundly says, history is shooting itself in the foot.



2. My principal tie with Jon Snow is one of his brightly-striped and very expensive-looking silk ties that I won in a competition for a political caption organised by the Channel 4 news programme that he fronts each weeknight. However there are much more important aspects of his approach as a journalist that I empathise with strongly. Jon Snow was born in 1947, the son of a Church of England clergyman who advanced to the episcopate. His upbringing, conventionally religious, conservative and patriotic, was one that he tells us near the start of the book `radicalised' him, and it seems to me that this expression needs to be treated with caution. He was indeed a fairly conventional `student radical' according to the fashion of that time, getting into trouble with his university authorities for protesting against apartheid. However the long-term outcome of his early mental awakening is not radicalism as I would understand the term, but simply sceptical rationality. I detect no burning desire to overthrow capitalism or to do battle with any establishment, for instance, nor any great theoretical basis to his politics. What I do sense on every page of this enthralling volume is a shining mental honesty that takes him to the conclusions and beliefs that the evidence of his own eyes warrants, and that is what I like about him.
   
   These days he is mainly a presenter and interviewer, but that is just how his career has turned out. He thinks of himself as a reporter basically, and he has been around and many states and kingdoms seen, not by and large goodly ones. He has never had any connexion with the BBC, making his first appearance on its airwaves only a few months ago as a guest on a late-night political discussion. I had rather hoped he might have gone into the theoretical issue of independence, bias and impartiality in reporting, but in the event the book only skirts it, and that was all I should really have expected. These reports are the records of a thinking man certainly, and he doesn't need in every case to spell out his thinking for it to be quite obvious what it is, but they are not analysis, only reportage with some editorial comment. What he has always done is to be perfectly open about his own general stance, and I imagine he would prefer to be thought of as `left' rather than as positioned elsewhere, much as I would myself. How, in the last resort, this colours his reporting and comment is hard to say. Not only is no reporter a tabula rasa with political attitudes that are 100% neutral, no listener or viewer is one of those either, so I don't know either whose word we take for it when allegations of bias are made, as they routinely are when any subject of any sensitivity is reported on by anyone at all. Snow was at one time seconded to ABC, and he tells us how his on-the-spot accounts were always checked against versions emanating from the State Department, the latter frequently diverging from his own. It was difficult, he tells us, to get any weight attached to the fact that he was an eyewitness and the State Department were not, and for me also this raises the familiar and incomprehensible issue of how people manage to think in this way. On what basis, or at least on what rational basis, is it possible to prefer the State Department version in these instances? None apparently, but there's no doubt that people think this way and will in all confused sincerity find bias in the only account that has any credible basis. Where the allegations are not sincere the case is really simpler. Snow has a fascinating tale to tell of an anonymous phone call he received that gave him just enough information to identify the source as being the office of HRH the Prince of Wales. This call related to the funeral arrangements for Princess Diana, concerning which a dispute at the very pinnacle of royalty was alleged. Snow duly reported what he had been told, and was refuted by one of the tabloids purporting to speak for Her Britannic Majesty personally. That's the way things are sometimes done.
   
   He has missed some stories, notably Tienanmen Square, and he puts this down to his instinctively greater interest in America, Europe and Africa, another inevitable source of bias, albeit innocent and unintended bias. The patent honesty of the man's mind shines through his memorable account of the buffoonish Idi Amin, and it would be impossible to detect any adornment in the story of how he and his crew nearly lost their lives in Kosovo. I have to conclude that there is no such thing as total impartiality in reporting, and that if there were none of us could recognise it. For myself, I'm inclined to place more confidence in Jon Snow than in most of his occasional detractors, something that of course may say more about me than about any of them. He offers opinions in a candid way, such as that Jimmy Carter was too intellectual to be decisive, but he never seems to preach or to sell a point of view. Just as a narrative, this book is not only gripping but a priceless historical record of some of the most important events in all history. Another issue that affects any reporting is, of course, what is left out. This is the more difficult to assess as I don't necessarily know what most of that was, but among the brief glimpses he lets us have of his personal life I note that there is no mention of his brief engagement to the queenly Anna Ford who now presents the BBC's lunchtime news.
   
   The final story is the Iraq war, where he candidly shares my own view that it's displacement activity to divert attention from the real terrorist threat and the failure to counter it. Looking back he traces a pattern of incomprehension and continuing failure to learn, due in large part to seeing issues through the prism of the interests of Israel. Does that make him biased? It seems obvious to me, so does that make me biased as well? If so, who are the paragons of impartiality who will put us right?



3. Unwilling to wait for the May US paperback release of Jon Snow's book, Shooting History: A Personal History, a friend sent me a gift copy from Amazon.UK. It is worth the extra effort. Jon Snow anchors the nightly news on Channel 4 in Great Britain. To get to that prominant seat, he seemingly spent most of the last 35 years reporting from every history-making hot spot in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Europe. Even his brief adventures in Asia -- getting arrested with Vietnamese boat people in Malaysia and covering the British handover of Hong Kong to China -- remind us of some of that region's most dramatic moments. But it is his interactions with some of the world's most notorious and important leaders of the second half of the 20th century -- and his casual, elegant way of writing -- that make this one of the most important and interesting books availble this year. Snow, for example, made his first trip to Africa at 19, to teach in Unganda in a Catholic missionary school. He met the future dictator Idi Amin at a boxing match, and returned later to chronicle Uganda's slide first into despotism and then into the crisis of AIDS. His African reporting also introduced him to the late Sudanese strongman Siad Barre and he was in South Africa to record Nelson Mandela's first moments of freedom after 27 years in a South African jail. Other world leaders Snow interviewed include Pope John Paul II, who referred to him as "the tall Englishman," Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In 1980 he courageously went behind the lines of the Salvadoran war to visit a village under the control of Salvadoran liberation fighters, returning a week later with Salvadoran government forces to the same village only to find it devastated by their military assault.
   
   As a news anchor, Snow is much more honest about his political sympathies than his US counterparts, while still reporting objectively and factually. As a young man, he opposed Britian's integration into Europe, but as an adult, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he came to see a united European Community as one viable -- and necessary -- antidote to the unchecked superpower of the United States. Most poignently -- and without heavy hands -- he talks about the tragic implications for US leadership and respect in the world today due to the Bush Administration's post 9/11 policies. Seen for years by most of the world as a beacon of civil liberties and freedom, the US response to 9/11, including the unilaterial and unnecessary preemptive war on Iraq and the willingness to curtail civil liberties at home, has sown confusion, disappointment and anger among the democratically inclined people of the world. But even these difficult opinions are delivered, like the rest of his story, with great irony and wit.
   
   All that politics and a good read, too.

1 comments about Love in the Second Act: True Stories of Romance, Midlife and Beyond.

1. There are so many jewels in this book. I have not yet finished reading it, but already have been charmed and delighted by the imagery and magic of real stories of love in the 'second act'. It is much more than I expected, it goes beyond finding relationships to the joy of experiencing love at a new level, a deeper level.
   
   Meet 97 year old Joe, who conjures up the image of an ancient yew tree: " ...that has grown vertically in its youth and horizontally in midlife...producing new living roots that feed on the soil, pushing down and down."
   
   Love sometimes comes in a back door you left open...I skipped to the back of the book to read the story of the Mansfield-Greenwald family and was deeply moved by their journey to China to adopt their daughters.
   
   This book should be read slowly to hear the beauty in it.

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