Month: March 2018

Daniel Tammet has Savant Syndrome, a particularly rare type of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) that gives him uncommon abilities, particularly with maths and languages. He sees numbers, not as we do, but as shapes, motions, textures, and colours, each one different so that he can recognise up to 10,000 different numbers.

He can divide 13 by 97 and give you the answer to over 100 decimal places, instantly. He set a British and European record for reciting the mathematical Pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places, taking more than five hours. He learnt an entire language (Icelandic) in a week, spoken and written. He speaks English, Lithuanian, French, Romanian, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Esperanto, and Welsh – with more languages on the way.

This book is his autobiography; fortunately he is one of the rare Savants who can communicate what is happening in his mind. Also he has learnt to live independently, unlike many other Savants. His condition was made famous by Dustin Hoffman in the movie, Rain Man. In this book he details his life growing up, and all the problems he had. Problems abound, for despite having a brilliant mind, he always had massive difficulties with everyday life.

As a child he was not interested in playing with other children, nor felt the need to talk with them, he would rather count beads, or drops of water. Worse still, when he talked he could not communicate on the same level. He did not know what to talk about, when to start talking, or when to stop talking, and what other children meant by their conversation. He would stare at the ground while talking, and go on and on about some topic that was of no interest to the other person.

When a teacher would look at him and say: 6 times 9, he would not understand that he was supposed to give the answer. He would just say nothing. If he was asked, “What is six times nine?’ Then he would answer. Conversation had to be precise and literal before he could understand. Hints, facial expressions, meant nothing to him. He was the last child in his class to learn the alphabet, and it took much practice to learn to tie his shoelaces at eight years of age.

School was difficult. Other kids would tease and bully him, but because he was largely indifferent to other children, he did not cry or get upset. All the same, he knew he was different and so did everyone else. He had a number of obsessions, the first was for counting things, for example memorising all the teachers’ car number plates. Another obsession was that things must follow the same pattern each day. As a three-year old he threw tantrums if his father took him a different way to the shops. Everything had to be in a precise order.

He was obsessed with numbers, maths, all kinds of calculations, and especially loved prime numbers. His mental powers with maths were beyond any advanced child. At school he could not understand why 6 was written in the same size as 8, and why 9 was not printed in blue, because this is how he saw them in his mind. When he wrote numbers, the teachers criticised his work telling him to write all the numbers the same size. He was puzzled by why they would tell him to do something that was obviously wrong. Unfortunately, he had problems with algebra, because he could not grasp letters in the same way as he understood numbers.

At school he kept away from other children and all outdoor activities. He read many books, but they did not help him as he began to realise that he was born on the wrong planet, never comfortable, never secure, always fearful, without any friends or companions. He would sit in his room and watch his siblings playing games and talking, and wonder why they talked about trivial things, since he did not understand the purpose of conversation.

Physically he had poor balance, an awkward gait, and mostly looked at the ground while he walked, afraid of loud noises, or sudden sounds. He didn’t like children’s games because they were noisy, physical, and confusing.

His parents were marvellous! They put up with all his strangeness, which other parents and children could not comprehend, for no one would have ever come across another person like Daniel Tammet. Doctors were no wiser, they had some vague theories about his condition, but it was not until he was 25 that he was diagnosed as Savant Syndrome, a rare form of Asperger’s Syndrome.

In common with many other Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) people, he had great difficulty in communication, both verbal and with body language. AS people do not understand what it means if someone stands up and says, “It’s getting late” and looks at their watch. An AS person would think something like, ‘What is getting late? Why is it getting late? Late for what? Late is relative to the present time. Why are they talking about time? Is time getting late? How can time get late? Puzzled by all this, they would say nothing, not understand what was happening. This of course often appeared rude to other people.

He was easily distracted, and when listening to someone was often confused because his mind would not be able to focus, so that he would not hear every word that was said, but only some words, and if the missing word was important, then he would not understand. The use of double negatives was a big problem for him, these made his head hurt and confused him as he could only understand things in a literal sense. Even as an adult he could not understand the sentence, “John is not tall, he is a giant.” It had to be carefully explained to him.

Twenty years old when World War One began, Vera Brittain was a well-to-do first-year student at Oxford and very much in love with young Roland Leighton, a friend of her brother Edward. In her work, Testament of Youth, first published in 1933, she ably recounts the many horrors of the conflict, how she joined up as a nurse-assistant to keep her from somber thoughts after the dearest men in her life had gallantly, if somewhat naively, marched off to war. With the help of her diary and a collection of letters, she articulately reconstructs with precision the sentiments that drove her onward through the next four turbulent years of hell.

Vera Brittain must have suffered tremendously. She lost both her love Roland and her only brother Edward. She also lost her Victorian innocence; she deftly paints the transformation from girlhood easily abashed by discussions of an adult nature to war-scarred nurse who sees the best parts of men amputated and thrown into bloody waste piles. She studied History at Oxford after the war and found work in journalism. Due to the intense emotional upheaval that she underwent, it took her fifteen years to detach herself enough from the experience to document it. After the war, she would evolve slowly into a writer of some import, a political speaker and a champion of feminism with a highly intellectual voice. She was eerily insightful about the future, and her struggle to be both a career woman and a mother was as intense as her fight to maintain her sanity in the slaughterhouses of war-torn France. She honestly retells incidents of post-war bouts with insanity, where she pulls frantically at an imaginary beard that appears every time she looks in the mirror, a sure sign of what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. The book is articulate and detailed, so much so that we’re left amazed that she so accurately reconstructed such involved hypothetical internal dialogues so many years after the events. If not a post-event concoction, she must have been an extraordinary woman.

The narration, though it has an important message to convey, is written in a style meant to curry favor with her former black-mantled dons of Oxford English. Get your like-named dictionaries ready for a steady assault of inanity with the likes of propinquity, asseverate, fecundity, propitiation, and supererogation. These verbal gymnastics aren’t helped by consulting the O.E.D. since the enforced expansion of diction leaves an after-taste that far outlasts the intended message. Her style is frequently cumbersome and pedantic, and through intellectual snobbishness, accomplishes the complete opposite of what was intended; it bores rather than inspires. Expensive erudition, like nudity, should only be exposed in tantalizing glimpses until the desire for more has been stoked by careful degrees to full flame.

In comparison to other important works of the day that deal with the personal costs of the war, such as Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, it doesn’t have the same emotional impact. Although hers was a true account, his a work of fiction, Vera doesn’t punch our lights out with her moving story mostly due to stylistic reasons. For example, a visual observer and reporter, she seems more concerned with the League of Nations delegates’ descriptions of white fluffy eyebrows topped by Bromberg hats than the thoughts and deliberations that took place behind them. Of the former we receive much and the latter none. Be prepared for many descriptions of purple and pink flowers set against lurid multicolored sunsets. As a result, we never get the much needed helicopter view of the wider events in which her life unravels.

Distractingly, she parades her erudition and horticultural knowledge in the style of grotesque Edwardian epaulettes-and-bemedaled patriotism, making the reader painfully aware of her Oxford robes, copiously employing phrases of Latin, Greek, French, and German (all without translation!), ten-dollar words, sprinklings of ‘deep’ poetry quotations (many of them curiously her own), and assumes quite wrongly, that the reader is familiar with the terms of elitist English lives. It clouds and handicaps the emotional message which should give the writer cause to take up the pen and the reader the motivation to sift through the 650 page result. Unfortunate, because the work at times simply becomes a historical curiosity in which the background conveys more than the foreground. We become amused, not only by the fact that that a twenty-year old did not know the sexual functions of male and female bodies, but that it took her twelve pages of circumlocution to express it. In this regard, her writing is important only if to reflect the spirit of her times. Her Victorian morals were destructive to the individual in that they suppressed the expression of the beauty of human experience in which sex plays the leading role.

This is perhaps why Hemmingway succeeds with fiction while Vera only seconds with an arguably more compelling truth. To skirt around truth with time-obscured euphemisms is to dance naked in the privacy of the bath and call it an orgy. Although deep and introspective, there is no orgy of the senses in her work since it lacks a certain honesty needed to bridge the gap between souls. She is a product of her inhibited generation and my interest in the startling contrast of her Victorian upbringing when single women were never on dates without a chaperone, compared to our age which permits young ladies to send nude pictures to prospective partners via the phone, is about the only reason that kept me reading the work. I kept wanting to know when she would finally be enlightened to the full details of sex.

She devotes many pages to ribald or suggestive anecdotes. Subconsciously her desires surface for air despite the conscious Victorian need to drown them. She remains frustratingly true to her buttoned-down class and never reveals what we thirst for, reminiscent of the contemporary sea-side bathers covered from head to toe in reams of Victorian swaddling and laced boots. The fruits of her strident feminism, and of the world’s for that matter, would only arrive in digestible bites.

We can thank the wholesale slaughter of men, intellectuals and others, for creating the void so abhorrent to nature into which her great intellect poured. Her work provides sufficient proof that women are as capable of producing the same level of progressive thought needed to propel and improve civilization, even in the face of the personal idiosyncrasies and foibles that face us all. Given the strength of the Victorian shackles her sex was burdened with, her accomplishments in advancing the cause of feminism are notable. She was one of the first carrying the banner, and like the millions of unprepared men asked to sacrifice themselves for no reward, she did the best we could expect of anyone in her times. It pains me to criticize such a historic milestone for the advancement of civilization, since it documents the ascendancy of feminism during and after WWI.

The Kaiser – His Life And Times by Michael Balfour is a studied, detailed and comprehensive picture of a man who made history. Kaiser Wilhelm II, or Bill, as the British preferred to call him, was Germany’s head of state during World War I, and, given current recognition of the centenary of the conflict’s opening, it is perhaps an apt moment to look again at the life of this absolute monarch who played such a pivotal role in the war.

It’s hard now to recognise that Kaiser Wilhelm was a grandson of Britain’s Queen Victoria. He was family and often expressed himself in English. But he also perceived a destiny that required him to emulate the great Prussian military leaders of the past, particularly Frederick The Great. In this task, however, he was doubly handicapped. On the one hand he clearly believed himself to be an absolute monarch, related to and answerable only to God, a belief that might have held sway in the eighteenth century but, by the opening of the twentieth, was mere anachronism. And, literally on the other hand, the Kaiser was hampered in his pursuit of macho militarism by a withered left arm, the result of an injury at birth when the infant had to be wrenched into the world by pulling too hard on the limb.

Michael Balfour’s portrait of Germany’s Emperor is much more than a life story. It’s a political, economic, military and, to some extent, a social history as well. It is packed with intrigue and machination, but all seen through a lens which imposes the distortion of an absolute ruler’s perspective, a distortion that for the contemporary reader actually aids understanding of otherwise inexplicable attitudes.

World War I, of course, is the big piece of history in this Kaiser’s lifetime, but Balfour’s account does not try to offer an account of the conflict, only the Emperor’s involvement and impact on events. The author suggests why the conflict might have dragged on for so long with the comment: “One of the most curious and pathetic spectacles of the war was the genuine conviction of honest men on both sides that a God whom all admitted to be universal was more in favour of them than of their opposition.” The Kaiser may have been an absolute ruler, but he did have his moments of doubt: “The Kaiser, in 1918, described war as ‘a disciplinary action by God to educate mankind’ (though he added that ‘God has not always been successful with these measures´).” Wilhelm’s insulation from most of reality might have encouraged him to believe his distorted view of the world. Balfour describes it thus: “Wealthy men with a vent for intellectual hobbies and not quite enough to do are apt to become cranks… ” But then his world view was certainly not faulty all of the time. He said, for instance, that: “… America is getting bigger, will go on gathering strength and will gradually absorb the power of England until she founds an English-speaking world empire of which England will be merely an outpost off the European continent”, so he was clearly right on occasions. But overall Balfour’s context claims that “… men on the German side… had not managed to transcend the nineteenth century outlook in which the sovereign national State in a world of similar States still represented a perfectly adequate solution to the problem of human organization” and this, married to the Kaiser’s belief in his own absolute right to rule, made any greater vision beyond these assumptions simply impossible. From separate city states to a unary German county and then on to world-dominating Empire was a progression that was simply assumed.

And contrary to our own time’s assumptions about national characteristics, Balfour asserts that eventually Germany lost the war because its administration was badly organised: “… the position at the top was unorganized and haphazard in the extreme.” Ally this with presumptions based on false premises: “The elite were so intent on inculcating what their inferiors ought to think, so indignant over any evidence about the real thought being different, that they insensibly came to base their own course of action on theories rather than facts. Dogmas survived because they corresponded to the prejudices and fulfilled the wishes of their authors, not because they embodied realities”, and again the distortion of false assumptions creates an inability to deal with the world as it is.

Charlotte Cole was one of the most unlikely people on the planet to get cancer-or so you would think. She rigorously believed in avoiding processed foods, using alternative health methods to stay in optimal health, and practicing her strong Christian faith to manage the stress in her life. But no matter what we plan, God makes other plans for us, and for Charlotte, cancer was one of them.

When stomach problems turned into a cancer diagnosis in July, 2011, Charlotte did not despair. She firmly believed God has a reason for everything, and while she knew the journey ahead of her would be difficult, she never relinquished her faith in God. From the start, she believed God wanted to use her cancer to help Him reach others-from other cancer patients who needed comfort to people who needed to have their faith strengthened. And so Charlotte began blogging about her cancer experience.

Heartbeats for Cancer is the compilation of a year’s worth of nearly daily blogs Charlotte wrote about her journey through cancer and her recovery from it. While she experienced physical pain and heart-wrenching moments, she also gained so much through this experience, including learning to let go of trying to control the situation to how to accept help from others. She realized she needed to cultivate a sense of gratitude and also give others the opportunity to show kindness toward her. She also learned to accept and befriend a wide variety of people, including a gay fellow patient and women in a Sober House, whom she learned, despite their own ordeals, were praying for her. In the end, Charlotte drew closer to God, her family, and her friends, and she opened herself to many new relationships; best of all, the benefits were mutual for those she interacted with since she opened up others to the miracles God can work in our lives when we get out of the way and let Him.

While readers are given a front row seat into Charlotte’s experiences with doctors, hospitals, and treatments, her cancer journey is also full of humorous and touching moments. I loved Charlotte’s sense of humor throughout the book, such as when she titles one chapter, “Sorry, Satan… It’s Time for Some Laughter,” when she tells the doctor her kids are hoping her diagnosis will mean she can smoke pot, and when she refers to herself as a Christian witch doctor because of her belief in alternative health remedies. And then there are poignant moments such as when she goes to the beach and finds someone else’s ostomy bag floating in the water, which makes her feel empathy for others. Nor is she afraid to be honest about her faith or point out when people wrongly use Christianity to judge others when judging should be left up to God.

Ultimately, Heartbeats for Cancer is both a realistic and inspirational look at one woman’s cancer journey. But it’s more than that-it’s a wakeup call for many of us to embrace life, get our priorities straight, and reinvest in our relationship with God. Near the end of the book, Charlotte urges us on with a call to action, saying:

“What about you? Hopefully, you don’t need cancer or something of that magnitude to shift into gear and move forward toward fulfilling your calling. Ask yourself, ‘If I only had a short time left here, is this how I’d want to be spending it?’ If not, make some radical changes; though be prepared for the resistance that will surely precede the fresh start. Make one small step: commit to one thing you’ve been putting off. I’d love to hear about it.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His book ‘Colored People’ is a splendid novel, and a classic memoir. It is a moving account about what it was to be ‘colored’ in the United States of the 1950s.

The stage for his novel is his native Piedmont, an immigrant town in West Virginia, which he describes in the most vivid and sentimental terms. Gates’ view of the world was of a child growing up in a colored neighbourhood-one which he depicts as ‘not so much of a neighbourhood as ‘a condition of existence’.

His neighbourhood’s themes are the book’s themes- the debasement, the villains and heroes, the names (both the derogatory and loving), the culture, the church, the friendships, the love, the vulnerability of his race and its disappointments, his family’s joys and sorrows. Marvellous is Gates’ account of his relationship with his mother, and the gradual evolution of young ‘skippy’ into the potent force and unceasing voice against injustice. In the margins of the story we see his rebelliousness and stubborn sense of justice which he inherited from his mother.

In the main, the book is about colored life in Piedmont, when white people were not around. It is tempting to look at the book as only about race and prejudice, which it partially is. But it is also about human sentiments and existence written in human language. Its beauty and genius is in capturing what some have forgotten, and what is commonplace, in a language that many don’t possess. It is a human story that almost outleaps any contextualisation. It is a mirror of a lost time, and finding one’s roots. Its beauty lies not only in its engaging insights, but also in its characters and the aesthetic nature of the narrative.

His language is never more sublime, grand and almost sailing beyond the known limits of great prose than in the book’s pen-ultimate paragraph: ‘The colored mill picnic would finish its run peaceably, then, if with an air of wistful resignation. All I know is that Nemo’s corn never taster saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negros gather to say goodbye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti-Jim Crow laws.’

Gates wrote the book for his daughters, Maggie and Liza. But, it is also an Ode to his mother-the woman of fine mind and elegant beauty who shaped his life. The difficulties of her long life, and era, had failed to quench her invincible self-confidence. The book’s last chapters read like a son’s valediction to a departed parent-expressing love and regret: the inevitable emotions of the living when death takes a loved one away.

Mostly, we read and acquire knowledge to know how things are. But, Gates’ passionate tale is how things were. Yet, with the sweep and narrative of his life we observe the unbreakable bonds that tie the past with the present. This is why Gates’ masterpiece, a graceful collection of tales and quest for lost history, is so important.