Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Jan 26 2025

Book review: The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker

I recently reviewed Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children, this book follows that theme – I’m reviewing The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker. The Teenager’s Guide is a far easier read, directed at teenagers rather than adults although it includes a section at the end for adults.

Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist well-known for her work on the mental health of children, parenting and schooling. She experienced many different schools in different countries as a result of her parents’ life-style. Eliza Fricker is an illustrator and author and has experience of the issues covered in the book and drew the illustrations.

The book starts with some generally comments about stress and burnout which could apply to anyone, it’s useful in setting the scene although I did worry whether I’d got the right book. Perhaps surprisingly the book doesn’t mention “autistic burnout” except in the final section for adults where Fisher says that burnout is burnout, some children are neurodivergent but that’s not the key feature.

The action quickly moves on to school which in general is what will cause burnout in teenagers. The process of burnout is divided into four sections:

  1. Breakdown – burnout often seems to come out of the blue, a child is “fine at school” and then suddenly can no longer go in. It is traumatic for parents as well as children. Fisher (rightly) attributes this largely to the school environment and emphasises that a return to school should not be the short term gaol. This stage is about re-connecting with the child, it turns out our family sessions of Fortnite were actually a pretty good thing to do!;
  2. Repair – this is when we start to find the new normal with a child at home not at school, and a family rearranged to accommodate. There is often sadness here at the life apparently lost. This stage is about the teenager trying to find some enjoyment in life;
  3. Learning from the journey – this is about learning about what went wrong; why was it that school became unbearable? Sometimes as parents we will discover that our well meaning efforts were just pressuring our child and worsening the problem. I think of our efforts to get our son to see a counsellor here;
  4. The Road Ahead – this is about finding another path to education, outside of mainstream school. Part of the current process is, typically, to pressure children by telling them that mainstream school is the only option and they will be a failure if they don’t attend. Fisher describes it as a myth, really it is an outright lie;

Fisher believes that a key mistake most people make is to see a return to mainstream school as the goal throughout this process. If an adult had a burnout as a result of a high stress job we probably wouldn’t see going back to that job as the goal. She sees the school environment as being the problem which reflects the WHO recognition of burnout as an “occupational phenomena”. She cites increasingly high pressure methods used in schools to control behaviour (see SLANT), enforce attendance (“your parents will be fined and may go to prison if you don’t go to school”) and recover the academic progress lost during the pandemic. I have to say I agree with all of this.

Fisher is scathing about schools, pointing out her experience of so many different school systems highlights which school rules are in fact unnecessary she mentions UK uniform rules and the UK tradition of calling teachers “Sir and Miss” as examples of this. The world doesn’t end if you don’t wear a school uniform and address your teachers by their first name.

Fisher says a little about why burnout is an increasing problem, some of it is changes in the world – particularly the pandemic. She mentions world events like climate change meaning there is little to hope for in the future, as a child of the seventies and eighties I can say there is no change there – we feared nuclear annihilation! She says that in the past those suffering from burnout might have been diagnosed as having glandular fever or simply truants. It strikes me that in the past twenty years or so we have been become (on the face of it) much more understanding of mental health issues in adults but we don’t extend that sympathy to children.

I found her comments on friends and social development interesting, one of the key worries of those educating at home is the lack of social interactions. However, Fisher points out that frequently younger children have a quite limited social circle covering only family and relatives. Friendship at secondary schools has the air of protection, being in with a group so you are not alone at lunch time or the school gate, not the target of bullying. That said she provides a long list of venues outside school where teenagers might find new friends.

I suspect this book will be mainly read by parents; teenagers in the process of burnout are likely only receptive to it at stage 4 (The Road Ahead). The best time for an adult to get this book would be prior to stage 1, perhaps when the first signs of issues at school appear but it is useful at any time in the process. I heartily wish no one needed this book.

The Teenager’s Guide is great: for affirming we are not alone, for providing reassurance and also for providing some strategies to try for a better future. Although it is purportedly written for teenagers it is fine for adults, making for an easy read with short recaps at the end of each chapter. There are some handy tables / exercises which also act as summaries.

Jan 24 2025

Book review: An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi

My next review is of An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi. On this topic I read Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop a few years ago. Badawi’s book was a chance discovery at the library – published in 2024. I know Badawi as a newsreader in the UK, she was born in Khartoum in the Sudan but moved to Britain aged 2. She is one of the Africans of the title but more generally she interviewed many African scholars in writing this book.

An African History makes a tour of Africa in broadly chronological fashion, starting with the earliest humans but moving quickly to the area around the Nile in the time of the ancient Egyptians finishing with the liberation struggles of the second half of the 20th century. The 17 chapters are typically named for the areas they cover, some like “Slavery and Salvation” are thematic but typically tied to a region. There are too many chapters for me to comment on each one so I try to provide a thumbnail sketch of the whole here.

There are some recurring themes in the book, the first is reference to the UNESCO General History Africa project – a much longer version of this book in some senses.

In contrast to Britain it feels like groups of people in Africa were more mobile with groups moving around the continent and resettling, also land ownership seems not to have been a common practice.

Badawi writes a little about how the sources for African history are typically accounts written by outsiders such as Arabic scholars, or European traders/slavers. Many of these sources need to be read in light of justification for the actions of their authors either slavery or colonisation. That said the spread of Islam across West Africa and down the Eastern coast of Africa would mean that written language was available from a relatively early date. African sources are typically based on oral traditions which do not have high standing with Western historians. The First Astronomers by Duane Hamacher talked about the power of oral traditions in transmitting information over thousands of years.

South of the Sahara archaeology has been neglected, and in Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia) very actively supressed.

Once the preliminaries of the dawn of humanity are covered the action moves to ancient Egypt, the Kingdom of Kush, Aksum and Ethiopia – all in the North East of Africa covering the modern day states and Sudan. European historians have often written about Egypt as “not African”, as if somehow such an advanced civilisation could not possibly be African (specifically Black). Ancient Egypt persisted from around 3000BC until 330BC when it was invaded by Alexander the Great. The Kingdom of Kush in present day Sudan arose at approximately the same time, when the area was cooler and wetter, and did not fall until the 4th century AD.

Further west along the North African coast we find the Carthaginians fighting the Punic Wars against the Roman Empire a couple of hundred years BC. They were a much more sophisticated society at that time than the Britons that Rome would later invade. Africa gets its name from Ifrikiya, the Roman name for the region. In common with many places North African communities were not uniform in their opposition to Rome some sided with them against other local groups.

Arabs entered Egypt in 639AD, a year after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. They were “semi-welcomed” by the Egyptian populace, the Byzantine rulers had not been great and the native Coptic Church was dominated by the Orthodox Church. From there they spread across North Africa rapidly, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar to take Spain in 711AD.

Sub-Saharan West Africa gets a few outings, firstly with Mansa Musa, leader of the Mali Empire 1312 – c. 1337 and reputedly the richest man to every live, primarily derived from the gold mined in the region. The Mali Empire was followed by the Ghana empire – 600-1235AD and then by the Songhay Empire 1435-1592. Further East there was Benin. These empires do not follow the boundaries of the modern countries who take their names, those were the invention of 19th century colonialists. Also in this area were the Asante. These were large sophisticated societies with complex trading and impressive metalworking, not clusters of mud huts.

The traffic of Africans across the Atlantic in the “triangle trade” is well-known. Less well-known is the Indian Ocean slave trade which had been run by Arab traders from 7th to 19th century with approximately 14 million African slaves traded into Arabia. Interestingly an African view of the end of slavery was that it ultimately came about because the slaving nations started to see that African labour was more useful in Africa than across the Atlantic. This culminates in the “Scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century. Africans also viewed the transatlantic slavery (hard labour with a life expectancy of 7 or 8 years) as far worse than “local” slavery. The local impact of slavery was large, a significant fraction of the particularly young adult male population was trafficked and since slaves were often initially captured by neighbouring African groups levels of suspicion between communities rose – slavery casts a long shadow.

Southern Africa covering present day South Africa and Zimbabwe is covered last in the geographic tour. Originally a stopping point for the Dutch East India company ships heading out to the Far East, it was taken over by the British in 1806. It attracted many white settlers who took land for agriculture with wool a primary export in the first instance followed by diamonds in the late 19th century. Zimbabwe and South Africa were the last countries to gain independence – Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 was one of my earliest political memories.

The book ends with the “Scramble for Africa” where European states divided up the continent in the 1884 Berlin Conference, control of Africa “passed” from African to European hands almost entirely between 1870 and 1890. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness captures this period – he says it represents “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration”.

At the time there was some armed resistance, generally overcome quite promptly by superior weaponry such as the Maxim gun. Independence happened after the Second World War, Badawi gives the impression that this process was generally peaceful – I’m not sure that is true. Large scale participation in the world wars by African soldiers drove a desire for independence, as it drove a desire for equality for Black British people at home. The US did not favour its European allies imperialist tendencies, and the colonies became too expensive to maintain after the destruction of the Second World War. The great powers were happy to interfere in the independence process though, the French destroyed much infrastructure as they left Guinea and the Americans with the Belgians backed a coup that deposed the independence leader Patrice Lumumba amongst many other examples.

Badawi ends with a positive note, talking about African as a continent whose population has an average age of 19, taking up new technologies rapidly. It is still blighted by poor government in places but things are improving.

I’m glad I picked this book up, I found it well-written and readable. It provides a great overview of African history with a different perspective to most of what I have read before.

Jan 20 2025

Book review: Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children by Phil Christie, Margaret Duncan, Ruth Fidler and Zara Healey

Today I open up a new strand of reviews with Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children by Phil Christie, Margaret Duncan, Ruth Fidler and Zara Healey. This is for reasons I alluded to in my review of 2024.

Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) is a condition first identified in children being evaluated for autism by Elizabeth Newson in the late 1970s.

The core of the PDA diagnosis is the idea that demands of a child causes them anxiety which results in a range of responses around refusing those demands, and developing strategies to avoid demand. This is a problem because often the child will refuse “demands” that would lead to things they wanted to do for example “Please put your shoes on so that we can go to the zoo” – “No!”. It also makes education and everyday life challenging.

The term did not enter the literature until around 2000, and its use has grown substantially since 2012 (see Google Ngram). This book was written around 2012. The current professional opinion on PDA appears to be that is a recordable trait for neurodivergence assessments but it is not a standalone diagnosis.

Understanding PDA is divided into 6 chapters:

  1. What is PDA?
  2. Positive Everyday Strategies – this is about managing PDA in the classroom;
  3. Living with PDA – this is about managing PDA at home;
  4. Providing the Best education for a child with PDA;
  5. Developing emotional well-being and self-awareness in children with PDA;
  6. Summing up and questions for the future;

The chapter “What is PDA?” is about diagnosis, it lists a set of diagnostic criteria and provides some examples of what these criteria look life in action. The criteria proposed for PDA are:

  1. Passive early history in the first year;
  2. Resists and avoids the ordinary demands of life;
  3. Surface sociability – sociability is used as a tool to avoid demands;
  4. Liability of mood;
  5. Comfortable in role playing and pretending;
  6. Language delay;
  7. Obsessive behaviour;
  8. Neurological involvement;

It places PDA alongside autism spectrum conditions broadly divided into “able autism” and “autism with additional learning disabilities”. Reading this I realised my son had some elements of the diagnosis but not many, I also noted that typically the children considered in this book were of primary school age – 5-10 years old. It was also a salutary reminder that our son’s behaviour is fairly mild, one parent reported being threatened by their 8 year old son with a knife! This was not the only example of violent behaviour in children.

Many parents reading this will be asking themselves whether their child fits this diagnosis, and many will be looking at the criteria and realising that they have at least some elements themselves. This presents issues in management of the condition but also provides valuable insights.

As someone with a background in physical sciences my predisposition is to see a diagnosis such as PDA as a concrete undisputable thing. However, it is better to see such diagnoses as a conversation opening to help discuss strategies for living with a child with PDA. The following chapters cover strategies for dealing with a child with PDA at home and in school. The strategies they come up with are as follows:

  1. Reducing demands;
  2. Disguising demands;
  3. Distraction;
  4. Offering choices;
  5. Ignoring undesirable behaviour;
  6. Flexibility and adaptability – learning to be willing to change plans;
  7. Depersonalising demands – a routine depersonalises demands;
  8. Staying calm and neutral – shouting can raise the “excitement” for a child, and so is something that might be sought;
  9. Dealing with bedtime difficulties – fortunately we don’t have these – they’re clearly a common problem;

This seems like an important section to read – it recognises that parents are not perfect and need to develop their own coping strategies. Parents also find themselves wondering where they went wrong to end in this position (they didn’t go wrong), and also feeling guilty for losing their tempers (which is common and natural). It also highlights that the impact of handling a child with PDA on other children including both siblings and class mates. Another lesson is that just because something on one day doesn’t mean it will work on another, the context and the child’s mood is important.

I found the chapter on handling PDA in school environments interesting, not for its relevance directly to me, but because government are keen on the idea of “inclusion” – teaching children on the autistic spectrum in mainstream schools. Reading the accommodations suggested for PDA pupils this seems unworkable, fundamentally because accommodations make a child stand out in a school and for children on the autistic spectrum that is something they definitely don’t want. Secondly, it is difficult to see how such approaches can be accommodated in class sizes of 30 or so typically found in mainstream schools. The authors comment that in the end success comes to the personal relationship between the child and the adult rather than any particular system.

I don’t think I would recommend this book, it is quite academic in style in a field that is not my own. It has to be seen a bit as a campaigning book for the PDA diagnosis written in 2012, so somewhat out of date. I found the National Autistic Society page on demand avoidance a useful alternative to this book. It provides a short summary of some of the key points in Understanding PDA with better context for the diagnosis’s wider, current relevance.

Dec 12 2024

Book review: The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols

My next review is a small departure, it is for The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols but rather than buy the physical book I read this interactive version, which has quizzes and embedded, runnable code.

The Rust programming language is the target for my next Rosetta Stone blog post which identifies all the tooling for a language. For Rust these tools (the compiler, formatter, linter, package management and automated documentation) are pretty much all “built-in” so my job will be easy. The challenge in this case has been learning the language since I try to write a little code for the Rosetta Stone posts to demonstrate what I’ve learned.

Rust is a relatively new language, very highly regarded amongst developers and one of only two approved for developing Linux. Its focus is on “safety” and speed. It has been used to make new, highly performant tools for the Python ecosystem, like ruff and uv, which is how I came to know of it.

For a Python programmer Rust does not look alien in the way that Haskell and Lisp do; admittedly it uses curly braces for scoping, is strongly-typed and supports pointers and references which are not features of Python but are common in other languages.

To me it feels like C but with some object-oriented features; the authors talk explicitly about it having features of functional languages including use of the Option value which contains something or nothing, the compiler enforces the handling of nothing. I think I might start using this more explicitly in Python which allows type-hinting to indicate an Option-like value. The other explicitly referenced functional feature is the use of closures, in Python closures are functions defined within functions or anonymous / lambda functions whilst in Rust they seem to be closer to functions passed as arguments to other functions.

Rust makes what seems an odd distinction between functions and macros in its standard library. Macros are identified with an exclamation mark, for example println! As I understand this is because a macro is implemented using code generation at runtime which allows the developer to supply, for example, a variable number of arguments to println! which would not be possible for a function println. Python doesn’t make this distinction and is very permissive in the arguments that a function can take, allowing both position and keyword arguments of variable number.

I was struck by the way that different languages use the same word for different things. For example in Rust a struct is both a data container but can also carry methods in the way that “classes” in other languages do. In Python an enum is a closed list of values but in Rust those values can have user-defined associated values so that an enum for IP address protocols can contain V4 and V6 (as it would in Python) but in addition it can hold an actual IP address associated with each entry in the enumeration.

My understanding is that Rust is considered an object-oriented language by some but not all. In practical terms the only object-oriented feature missing is inheritance although this can be approximated by the use of generics and traits.

Since I have scarcely used pointers and references in 40 years of programming I found these concepts a bit challenging but I have made progress in my understanding through reading this book. Excited by this new found understanding I was then confused by Rust’s ownership model! Ownership and borrowing are the big, unique conceptual features of Rust. The aim of ownership is to rigorously ensure that code is safe – no writing past the end of arrays, or dereferencing null points. It also means that the performance hit of a garbage collector is not required, this task is pretty much entirely handled at compile time by the borrow checker. The strong ownership model makes concurrent programming easier too.

In trying to understand ownership and borrowing I found some useful tools, the best entry point was the BORIS tool by Christian Schott which lists other visualization tools including the Aquascope tool used in this book. I found the first such tool in RustViz which is used in teaching, it needs the user to put annotations into the code rather than working out the annotations itself. I also read this article by Chris Morgan.

As language books go, this one is pretty readable, and I found the built-in quizzes handy, if only to illustrate my ignorance particularly of the ownership and borrowing model. I think for my next technical book I might read Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski. I have felt when applying type-hints to Python, and learning Rust and Haskell that I was missing out by not understanding at least the basics of category theory.

I enjoyed this book and the format worked pretty well for me, although I need to find a way of reading online content like this in more comfort. I’m keen to give Rust a go now!

Nov 17 2024

Book review: Roman Britain – A New History by Guy de la Bédoyère

Following on from my previous review of Echolands by Duncan MacKay on Boudica’s revolt against the Roman occupiers of Britain, this review is of Roman Britain: A New History by Guy de la Bédoyère. Roman Britain has a much wider scope than Echolands covering the whole period of Roman influence in Britain from Caesar’s abortive invasions in 55 and 54BC through to the period after the Roman’s left Britain in 410AD. This is a larger format book with illustrations and photographs on virtually every page.

The book starts with three chapters on the timeline of Roman Britain covering the pre-invasion period, the extended conquest and the later period. Eight chapters follow on different themes: governing Britain, military installations, towns in Roman Britain, industry, commerce and production, the countryside and villas, people and places of roman Britain, religion in Roman Britain and the aftermath.

Britain was know to the Greeks as far back as the 4th century BC, and there was trade in tin from Britain from that time. By the middle of the 2nd century BC ornate burials were being found in Britain containing imported goods, and coinage was starting to be found. Hengistbury Head, where my father lived in his retirement, was an important trade port in this period. This tells us that Britain was not unknown to the outside world when Caesar made his invasion attempts in 55BC and 54BC. These were unsuccessful in the immediate sense but over the intervening years to the invasion proper in 43AD there was a gradual Romanisation of the upper echelons of British society, and increased trade.

Both Caesar’s abortive invasion, and Claudius’s successful invasion in 43AD were driven by politics in Rome, military success were a credit to an Emperor. British politics may well have played a part: Cunobelinus, king of a large chunk of Britain, died in 43AD and the resulting uncertainty over succession was a good opportunity to invade. Claudius’s invasion succeeded because the Roman army were a very efficient, well-equipped military force and their opposition was divided with some on the British side likely supporting the Romans.

The Romans spread to a line linking Lincoln and Exeter by 47AD, and by the end of the 1st century they had reached the limits of Wales and the far North of Scotland. Over the next 50 years there was some consolidation but by 150AD the Roman’s had reached the geographic limit of their occupation of Britain. It seems that the South-East of Britain became fairly well Romanised with villas and towns in the Roman style. North and West of the 47AD frontier life seemed to continue more in the manner of the Iron Age but for the addition of Roman garrisons and forts with related trade and industries.

Most of what we know of Roman life in Britain is based on the inscriptions left by the military, on tombstones and dedications of building works. There are limited number of wooden writing tablets, discovered at Vindolanda by Hadrian’s Wall and in London, which provide a fascinating insight into daily life, trade and interpersonal relationships. The early period of the occupation is discussed in Tacitus’s writings, as well as some other fragments.

We get a very small sample of daily life from from archaeology, only about 0.01% of all deaths are represented in burials and, assuming villas had 40 occupants each, homes for only about 0.01% are known.

Much of the rest of our understanding seems to come from recognising that Britain was being run like any other Roman province and extrapolating across archaeological and historical writings from all over the empire. Roman’s had firm ideas about which people could hold which positions (qualified by property), and Roman towns had a specific set of amenities according to their official type. Britain was seen as a troublesome province and had quite senior governors who typically only had a short tenure – some went on to become Emperor.

The Roman’s seemed to have respected the British as traders, seeing them as taking on Roman ways in this regard. Agriculture was important, and there is a lot of evidence of lead production – unlike iron, lead tends to survive quite well. Coinage was only minted in Britain from the late third century – it would not be used so heavily until the 17th.

There is limited evidence for the health and ethnicity of the Roman Britons, they seem to have increased dental issues. There was certainly the idea of branded medications, particularly for eye conditions. It isn’t clear whether there was a patent system. It is certain that Roman soldiers came from around the Empire but identifying them is hard since typically they Romanised their names.

Most of the writing we find the Roman period relates to religion (shrines, tombstones, altars). For a large part of the Roman period people worshipped hybrid Gods – amalgams of Roman Gods with local pagan deities or even from elsewhere in the Roman empire. Later the Christian church became established – we have written evidence of a church hierarchy from 314AD.

From the beginning of the third century AD the Roman empire was beginning to split up. Rome finally withdrew support for the military occupation of Britain in 410AD. This had an immediate economic impact because there was no longer new coinage coming into the country, or military salaries to spend. Physically Roman buildings decayed over a period of 150 years or so with the now non-Roman occupants no longer having the will or skill to repair them. We can mark the complete end of practical Roman influence with the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons in 577AD although we see the marks of the Roman occupation even now in our landscape and language.

Roman Britain finishes with a chronology and a guide to visiting Roman sites in Britain, I feel in this section insufficient attention is paid to my home town of Chester!

This is a beautiful book, and rather readable.