Tim O'Hare

I’ve just finished Ed Smith’s “What Sport Tells Us About Life”. Ed Smith was a professional cricketer (who played a few times for England) but he has now developed a career as a journalist and writer. His book WSTUAL was much lauded in the media when it came out and, as someone who likes sport and likes analysis, it seemed to be very much my cup-of-tea. It is basically a series of essays about various aspects of sport and watching sport (cheating, money, leadership, coaching/management) which each try to connect with some  observations of how we lead our lives more generally. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as interesting or insightful as I thought it was going to be. I think this is perhaps because there is no over-arching theme or argument. I particularly liked one section on how different people watch sport in different ways, within which there was a comment from the head of British Airways, who, when watching sport, focusses on the leadership that is taking place. He grew up in Australia and played cricket in a team that was captained by Rodney Marsh (who went on to be one of the greatest cricketers and wicket-keeper-batsmen there has been). He noted that Marsh (and others) were successful leaders because “They set people up for success by creating the right environment” (one that is confident, tough but always fun). I like that quote and I like the idea that the “right environment” should be one involving fun. That’s something I am going to try to hold onto in my own work.

Last week I finished reading the third and final book in Tim Severin’s Viking series – “King’s Man”. Tim Severin is best known as an explorer/writer/broadcaster who has re-created a number of famous voyages and journeys from history, but a few years ago he decided to enter the “historical fiction” market and wrote the first of his Viking series. Being a regular reader of other books in this genre (particularly those by Bernard Cornwell) I came across Viking 1 in a bookshop and since then I have acquired and read all three books in the series. Now, I think it is fair to say (and the fact that I have bought all of these books in discount bookshops provides some support) that Severin is no Cornwell – the books are readable and weave together fiction and real history well enough but they’re not especially well written or gripping. The aspect of the writing that amuses me most is that Severin clearly seems to get bored with writing the detail that accompanies large parts of the plot and every now and again he just decides to move the plot on in one big step. So, we get pages and pages of day-to-day detail and then, quite suddenly, the main character goes off somewhere and in the space of a few sentences a couple of years have passed or his female companion has been killed in a house fire or some such dramatic event occurs.

The last book I read was another piece of non-fiction, namely Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” (see Malcolm Gladwell’s website for further details). This is a book about the process of making snap judgements about things and about how we should value this kind of judgement properly but also act with caution in relation to them. The book ranges around a lot of different subject matter and although I found it all interesting I was particularly struck by the section on bad judgements made by armed police and the similarity between their perception when under the stress of chase scenarios and when gun fire is underway and the perception of individuals with autism. In both cases, the people involved seem to stop seeing other people around them as people and only see them as objects, the consequence being that that do not pick up on the valuable visual clues provided by the human face and use the ability of the human brain to instantly read these clues. A couple of days after reading this book I was listening to a Scientific American podcast that was reporting on some new research on toddlers with autism. This suggested that toddlers with autism did not look at people’s eyes (the “window to the soul”) but instead look at the mouth if there is speech or hands (e.g. if someone claps). I was struck by the parallel here – autism seems to involve children looking directly at the source of physical disturbance (e.g. mouth/hands producing a noise) and not seeing people as people and armed police making bad decisions seem to be transfixed by the noise of gunfire, stop looking at faces to gauge more about their target’s real behaviour or intentions – both groups stop perceiving others as people and respond to them only as objects. This is definitely a simplistic way of looking at things but the coincidence of the two ideas does seem to point in something like a single direction.

I like to mix fiction and non-fiction reading and often alternate between the two. The last book I completed was “The Falls” which is the twelfth Inspector Rebus novel by Ian Rankin. This one has an interesting plot that is not simply a crime investigation but also has quite a bit of character development compared to some of the other books in the series. As usual with Ian Rankin, it was a throughly enjoyable read although I was left with a feeling that if they had investigated the obvious suspects properly in the first place and hadn’t muddied the waters by involving a number of external people in the police investigation then things might have proceeded an awful lot quicker. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been such a good story!