Book Review: The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins

I love books – hard copies, not e-books. So when I read something riveting, I make it a point not to dog-ear a book or make notes in the book itself. But when I’m tempted, the entire book-reading experience unfortunately turns into either a drawn-out, internal battle with myself to drop the pencil or a note-making chore.

From the moment I started reading The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins, I had to stop myself from reaching out for a pencil. But when I made it to the end of the first chapter without giving in, to my surprise, I saw he’d included a summary of the very points I wanted to underline! Not only did it save me from the inevitable internal turmoil, but it also saved me precious note-making time.

It’s an excellent example of chapter two – Know your audience.

Atkins is a presenter on BBC News whose ‘explainer’ videos (according to me) are a masterclass in packaging complex issues in an accessible, informative, and deceptively effortless manner. He weaves in just how painstaking the process of making them is into the book.

But the book isn’t just for journalists. In my opinion, Atkins has managed to accomplish something that most communication people struggle with – targeting a very wide audience.

He’s managed to tailor-make the book, with summaries, quick references, examples, and anecdotes, so that it’s relevant for anyone who needs to explain anything to a tough crowd – a primary schoolteacher in front of disinterested kids or an employee trying to pitch a brilliant new idea to a busy boss.

Apart from appreciating the fact that you can see that every sentence is meticulously mulled over, I also appreciated the author’s general tone. Atkins’ tone is warm and open. He is unstinting with his praise for his colleagues and makes sure he credits people as he goes along.

At the same time, he doesn’t hide the disappointments he’s had to deal with in his career. He explains how, over the years, he turned what he learned through those experiences into input for the painstaking preparation of whatever he produces. He writes that when someone asks to see how he edits, he sees it in their eyes that they wonder ‘why he’s obsessing over details this small’. “I do this because the details add up to something that is more than the sum of its parts,” he writes.

The book isn’t necessarily an easy read – it depends on what you want to get out of it. It can be, if you’d like to skim the surface of what the book has to offer, there are short explanations for every aspect of the book. For example, there’s a short chapter on writing emails.

It’s not an easy read if, like me, you want to use it as a guide to step up your explanations at work and study to a whole other level. If so, you might just have to whip out your notebook and start making notes, which I now, unfortunately, realise I cannot escape.

Book Review: The Nutmeg’s Curse – Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

This book starts with the mystery surrounding a story of a lamp falling in the dead of the night on the island of Selamon, in the Banda Archipelago, in 1621. This lamp sparked the genocide that was to follow on the Banda Islands by the Dutch East India Company.

The Banda Islands are surrounded by still-active volcanoes and one of the gifts of this volcanic soil is Nutmeg. According to Ghosh, at the time, the worth of this spice in Europe had reached mythical proportions describing it as “envy-inducing symbol of luxury and wealth that conforms with Adam Smith’s insight that wealth is something desired, not for the material satisfaction that it brings but because it is desired by others.”

In the following chapters, he writes about the colonisation of the Americas and the brutal treatment of the indigenous people at the hands of the colonisers. Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-born writer, frequently refers to the decades-long colonisation of India in his book as well. As an Indian, I was especially keen to read his views.

Not a book on colonisation.

This, extremely well-researched book is filled with parables on how the extermination of the indigenous peoples led to the extermination of a type of thinking that had kept the original inhabitants in rhythm with the land they lived on for centuries, till the colonisers arrived.

In addition to other truly Machiavellian practices like terraforming, this was done by systemically linking nature-based thinking, solutions or mysticism with so-called ‘savagery’, and replacing it with market-based thinking that viewed the Earth as a resource simply to be used and  inevitably exploited. The consequences of which we are facing today with the climate crisis.

Now, he writes “The Western settler-colonial culture is no longer confined to the settled colonies. Since the adoption in 1989, of the Washington consensus, the ideologies and practices of settler-colonialism have been actively promoted, in their neo-liberal guise, by the world’s most powerful countries, and have come to be almost universally adopted by the national and global elites.” And it’s these settler-colonial practices that are now being implemented in many a former colony, unfortunately.

The parables in this book are forcing me to rethink my ideas of progress. As a product of a post-colonial society and education, I am beginning to see more clearly how deeply entrenched our mistaken views of progress in this world are. It made the need to re-establish a value system that is not rooted in exploitation, and has a more symbiotic relationship with the Earth, all the more urgent to me.

In this book he elaborately explains why we cannot fight the climate crisis by simply using market-based-solutions-thinking – the very thinking that caused this predicament in the first place. To truly tackle the climate crisis, we first need to question the foundation of our foggy and distorted ideas of progress.

In my opinion, books like this one are fighting hard to break through this fog.

Book Review: The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

This is by no means a new book. But it crossed my path recently and I found it to be quite a good read. Especially if you are in the business of content creation or storytelling. Whatever format that may be in, videos, text, images etc.

I must admit I had to plough through the first three chapters. But after that it really drew me in. At the heart of the book lies the fact that stories are a way for us, human beings, to understand and break down the world around us. Our brains are constantly working hard to piece together bits of information into coherent stories that give our lives, and what is happening around us, meaning.

In the chapter ‘The mind is a storyteller’ he writes:

The human mind is tuned to detect patterns and, it is biased toward false positives rather than false negatives. According to psychologists, this is part of a ‘mind design’ that helps us perceive meaningful patterns in our environments. Our hunger for meaningful patterns translates into a hunger for story.’

And not just any story. We seem to thirst for stories with happy endings and a good strong moral on which we can base our lives.

But that’s not all. He also explores conspiracy theories. Afterall, they are stories too. They help their readers make sense of the world around them. Of them, he writes ‘conspiracy theories – no matter how many devils they invoke – are always consoling in their simplicity’.

Usually there is a bad guy or guys that need to be defeated for the problem to simply go away. While Gottschall does not delve into the heart of conspiracy theories, I find that his ideas do offer some insight into the rise of conspiracy theories. Particularly now, with social media laying bare all the sufferings from around the world we need a bad guy to vanquish to make everything better. Quickly.

This book offers a deep insight in the mind of a storyteller i.e., every human being. Every minute of our lives are embroiled in stories of our own making or those we’ve learned from books, the internet, tik-tok or youtube. So, it is a good read for those of us who are creating stories to draw in people so that they can take positive action – whether that is towards mitigating climate change or supporting human and animal rights.

What I primarily took away from this book was just how intrinsic storytelling is to our living experience, right down from the caveman with their paintings  to us with our books and blogs. The medium may change by the need for stories will not. Without stories we simply cannot exist.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of The Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte

I highly recommend this book. Particularly if you still carry your childhood fascination for dinosaurs into adult life. As I do. Paleontologist, Brusatte, manages to distill a vast amount of complex information into an accessible book. He also explains complex geological concepts and research findings with great ease. He peppers the book with anecdotes that lighten what could be a dry read. And the passion with which he pursues his subject echoes in each page of his book.

T. Rex
Fausto Garcia for Unsplash

 

 

 

 

 

 

The narrative around dinosaurs is often one of failure, that they died at the peak of their time on Earth. However, in the Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, Brusatte views these beasts, that have captured our collective imagination, as an evolutionary success. At a time when the Earth’s core came bubbling over, and on more than one occasion baked its inhabitants, dinosaurs managed to survive, evolve and become monstrous marvels that somehow survived millions of years. Of the sauropods (the Brachiosaurus, the Brontosaurus etc.) he writes that one of the reasons why they managed to grow as large as they did was as because they “weren’t competing for the same plants but dividing the resources among themselves.” The scientific term for this, he says is niche partitioning.

I am inclined to agree with him. This book was first published in 2018. But I am reading it now in the midst of a pandemic and at the brink of a climate catastrophe. And that brings me to my main take-away from the book.

The Earth’s warming, the seas heating and melting icecaps aren’t a new phenomenon. This has happened before and will happen again for sure. But our behaviour has exacerbated the process tremendously. What took a couple of a million years in the time of the dinosaurs, in the era of human beings has just taken a couple of millennia. Us human beings haven’t lived a fraction of the lives of the dinosaurs. Evidently, the Earth will renew itself and new life will blossom. Will human beings be a part of that new life? Like dinosaurs will we evolve and reinvent ourselves and perhaps partake in some niche partitioning?

So, it seems to me that the climate isn’t in crisis, human life is. Shouldn’t we call it what it is? Who knows, it just might elicit the response we need to address it.

Book Review – ‘Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel’ by Carl Safina

In his introduction, Carl Safina writes “When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn’t just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of the elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living.”

Elephants at a watering hole in Namibia
Photo by Richard Jacobs on Unsplash

The book isn’t about poaching. It is a well-researched look into how animals, primarily elephants, wolves and killer whales, communicate. Safina’s enthusiasm and curiosity are palpable throughout the book, making it an easy read.

When I started reading it, I must admit that I was worried it would be highly anthropomorphised. In fact, rather than making anthropomorphic assumptions he vigorously questions and examines his subjects’ behaviour. For example, in the chapter ‘A Perfect Wolf’, he delves into the story of Yellowstone’s legendary ‘Twenty-One’ – The wolf who never lost a fight and never killed a vanquished foe. Of this Perfect Wolf, he writes “Twenty-one’s restraint in letting vanquished rivals go free seems incredible. What could it be? Mercy? Can a Wolf be magnanimous? And if so, why?”

At the same time, it is hard not to draw any parallels with human communication and motives. He writes “Certainly, projecting feelings onto other animals can lead to us misunderstanding their motivations. But denying that they have any motivations guarantees that we’ll misunderstand it. Not assuming that other animals have thoughts and feelings was a good start for a new science.”

Although this book was published five years ago in 2015, according to me, if you work with animal welfare, conservation or just love animals, this book is a jewel. It opened my eyes to the depth, wonder and intricacies of communication amongst animals. And also, to the genuine dedication of the people who surround them and how far they’ll go to protect them.