Sep 22 2025

Book review: Untypical by Pete Wharmby

Untypical by Pete Wharmby is a book about the personal experience of autism, and ways you can help autistic people in your life*. I picked it up because my son is on the waiting list for an autism assessment (1 year in and counting), and I have suspicions about myself – my wife’s suspicions are stronger!

Wharmby worked as a teacher for some time before a diagnosis of autism after the birth of his daughter and a bout of depression, he stopped teaching as a result of the COVID pandemic and is now self-employed as an author and speaker on autism. The book is very personal, I found it compelling reading.

Untypical is divided into 8 chapters covering different aspects of autism and life. Each chapter includes some bullet points on how you can help an autistic person, which can be summarised as “show some empathy given the information in this book” but you’ll need to read the book to get the details.

The first couple of chapters are on socialising and friends. The problem with socialising is not knowing the rules of communication, which are unwritten. Many autistic people have a phobia of telephones as a device for talking to people because the number of cues as to how to respond are reduced still further. Online friendship often works very well for them though. I am the most sociable person in my household (this really isn’t saying much) and the most likely to use a telephone although, with the exception of talking to parents, it is a last resort. I remember not feeling extrovert and sociable for a very large part of my life, nowadays I find it useful in addressing anxiety but I feel like I’m simulating being sociable. For autistic people this type of simulation is called masking, and it can be exhausting to maintain. Later, talking about the transition to university, Wharmby says that he used alcohol, probably to excess, to cope with the social side of university – this too sounds familiar.

Wharmby talks about falling into university almost by accident, it was the easiest next step having obtained good A-level results. This is the subject of the next chapter, “Tying shoelaces and Other Daily Challenges” which talks about the issues autistic people can have with getting started on something (autistic inertia), executive function (working towards a goal) and PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance). If you are interested in PDA then When the Naughty Step Doesn’t Work by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker is well worth a read. This isn’t to say autistic people can’t do goal-oriented tasks – they just need to be cast in the right way. I think here of Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, completed with machine-like precision over a 10 year period. Wainwright may or may not have been autistic but nevertheless his Pictorial Guide looks exactly like the product of a “special interest”. I feel the same way about much of my career, a lot of it was down to following the easiest path boosted by my “special interest” driven abilities.

In the context of autism a “special interest” or monotropism is a strong focus on a single subject. They provide a way of regulating moods and managing stress. The autistic sensorium is very cluttered and finding a single point of focus is soothing. Wharmby talks about computer games, Minecraft, Pokémon Go, Lego and trains as examples of his “special interests”. His go-to task for immediate stress relief is to read a Wikipedia page about a steam train. As I write I am just entering my weekly gas, electric and solar panel meter readings into a spreadsheet, a dataset which stretches back to 2004. My dad kept a notebook in the glove box of his car where, usually my mum, wrote the mileage, volume of petrol bought and cost whenever they visited a garage. I was very confused when I discovered my wife’s car had no such book!

The chapter on school is close to my heart, it is the reason my son is on a waiting list for an autism assessment. For autistic children school is a nightmare, on top of the forced socialisation they are usually very overwhelming sensory environments. We found that the “need for justice” mentioned later in Untypical is also an issue, particularly around group “punishments”. Wharmby observes that much “bad behaviour” can be attributed to child reaching the point of autistic meltdown. He has some words on the nightmare of group work which will speak to many adults. This chapter is very timely since the Education Select Committee’s SEND Inquiry report is very keen on inclusion in mainstream schools as a solution to the SEND crisis – the committee have noted that the Department of Education has failed to define what this means. Wharmby notes that when he was at school in the 1990s refusal to go to school did not appear to be an option. Attendance in school dropped after the the COVID pandemic – I think it demonstrated that school was not the only place to learn for a very large number of children and their parents. In addition the restrictions of the COVID pandemic pushed some autistic people into meltdown – all the social interaction rules changed, and then changed back again as normal life resumed.

The issues with work are largely those of school, with uncontrolled environments and people all over the place. He calls out hot-desking specifically. Wharmby also mentions that autistic people can be very sensitive to criticism (hence my footnote to this post). The most stressful part of my working life has been annual assessments, this are critical by design – the company typically wants to see a distribution in “grades” and will tend to criticism rather than support. I can also say this is stressful for a manager. The same applies in redundancy processes, the company will seek to show you are not up to the job in order to smooth your exit from their point of view.

Chapter 7 talks a bit about the overlap of autism and ADHD with the resulting restless brain. This is where “stimming” comes in. Stimming is a variety of repetitive actions (every autistic person has their favourite) which provide some relief from stress – these can be disturbing to the neurotypical. This chapter also talks about the stresses of all forms of travel for autistic people usually through unpredictability and crowded and noisy environments. I was struck with his comments on struggling with mindfulness meditation as a way of providing relaxation, I too have struggled with mindfulness – finding it incredibly difficult to focus on just my breath, for example, or dispassionately observing my thoughts passing by.

The final chapter is on the autistic need for justice, mentioning Greta Thunberg’s campaigning on climate change (Thunberg is autistic), and also intersectionality – the overlap of the autistic community with the trans community in particular but also the neglected areas of being a woman and autistic and black and autistic. He highlights a couple of online resources which provide wider coverage of the autistic community – I’ve signed up to the Neuroclastic newsletter.

I have to say that overall it is a bit of a harrowing read, Wharmby has a nice writing style but the continual state of stress and anxiety he finds himself in is oppressive for the reader let alone the author!

Wharmby writes near the end of the book that he considers himself an imposter as an autistic person, something that he attributes to his late diagnosis. I must admit to feeling the same, I don’t think I’m as autistic as he is but so much in this book struck a chord with me. At the age of 55, and semi-retired, I don’t see the point in seeking a diagnosis, for my son I see it as useful but I must admit to some qualms about medicalising him for the sake of fairly limited support. I also worry that owning up to autism will not help secure a job.

The rising diagnosis of autism is a hot topic currently, to me it seems that there have always been a lot of autistic people but we never recognised it as a distinct thing, even in white men and boys, let alone women and girls or any other ethnicity. If we look back the signs were there: my dad’s petrol consumption recording, the male Hopkinson’s all stimming as they organised themselves for a family photo, the trainspotters, a whole load of scientists who recorded detailed data on all many of things…

Untypical is definitely worth reading: it either describes you, someone you know or someone you will interact with and more knowledge can only be a good thing. It’s important because life expectancy for autistic people is much lower than for others, and with some adaption their/our lives could be so much better.

*For the benefit of Pete – this is not a critical review, my reviews are descriptive much to the chagrin of professional historians!

Sep 15 2025

Book review: Six Thousand Years of Bread by H.E. Jacob

Six thousand years of bread by H.E. Jacob is an idiosyncratic book, I picked it up because I was interested in the history of bread. It covers a great deal of history and religion with bread (and hunger) a central theme. I had expected a more technical focus on flour, yeast and the bread making process over time.

The author, Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a German-Jew – arrested by the Nazis in 1938, imprisoned in Dachau and then Buchenwald before being released and emigrating to the United States. He worked as a journalist and author throughout his life. Six Thousand Years was published in English in 1944, the result of 20 years of research.

Six Thousand Years is divided into six “books” with each book comprised of a number of chapters – about 36 in total. To avoid confusion I’ll refer to them as sections, the sections are as follows:

  1. The Bread of Prehistoric Man
  2. Bread in the Ancient World
  3. Bread in the Middle Ages
  4. Bread in the Early Americas
  5. Bread in the Nineteenth Century
  6. Bread in our Time

The first section on The Bread of Prehistoric Man covers the domestication of grain and the invention of the plough. Jacob lists the species domesticated grass from millet (earliest), oats, barley and wheat (also early), rye (late classical) and maize, suggesting Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the source of wheat based on the diversity of species there. The modern view is that domestication happened further north in the Fertile Crescent centred on Mesopotamia. He locates the invention of the plough in Mesopotamia although he mentions China, he thinks the ancient ploughs found there were too sophisticated to have been invented there. I think this reflects the understanding of China in the West at the time of writing.

Bread in the Ancient World covers the invention of bread in the Ancient World, primarily in Egypt where leavened (sourdough) bread is believed to have been invented. There are tomb paintings from the period showing Egyptian bakeries. Bread was a de facto currency alongside beer, and was very central to Egyptian life. Herodotus referred to the Egyptians as “bread eaters” and made fun of their habit of kneading dough with their feet. Also included in this section are the symbolism of bread in Judaism, early Christianity. The parts on Greece are oriented around mythology and religion whilst Rome is more political. I was surprised the degree to which wheat was imported to Greece and Rome from Egypt and the area around the Black Sea.

After the fall of the Roman Empire a lot of agricultural knowledge was lost, this led in part to an outbreaks of ergotism most notably in 10th century France. Also lost was knowledge of water (grain) mills, and certainly an understanding as to why they were prone to exploding (flour dispersed in air is very explosive). A lot of the background to this section is the animosity between the peasant growing and harvesting grain, and the miller – often milling on behalf of a lord who banned milling in the home, the baker and the townsfolk. There is also a section here on transubstantiation and the Reformation, as well as hunger – which was a recurring feature of life in the Middle Ages. Hunger seems to have arisen largely because of the way society was structured with the peasants growing grain very restricted in what they could do with the grain they had grown, and obliged to pay significant tithes.

Moving to the Americas we learn about the introduction of maize and potatoes to the West from the Americas. Again Jacob seems to be a bit mystified that non-Western peoples could breed maize and potatoes without Western intervention. Maize is in many ways superior to wheat, it grows more quickly in the climate of much of the Americas and requires little in terms of preparation to plant. The introduction of maize and potatoes to the West was quite rapid but there were suspicions about both. Rye was more successful in the Americas than wheat. Interestingly there was a rye / wheat divide in Europe with Germany, Poland and Russia eating rye bread almost exclusively and France and England eating wheat bread – this division weakened in the period after the French Revolution as white bread became aspirational.

The main focus of the 19th century is on the mechanisation of agriculture, starting off in the United States with mechanized reaping machines in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that roller mills were introduced which allowed white flour to be made more easily, and improved throughput. Bread baking in the US started to be mechanised. Elsewhere Justus von Liebig was working on artificial fertilizers which improved yields – this was on the basis of improved understanding of plant biology. In the American Civil War bread played a role – the North grew wheat, made bread and transported it on the new railway lines – the South grew cotton which you can’t eat nor could it be sold abroad and grain import imported. Furthermore, the North grew and harvested wheat with a reduced workforce, many having gone to fight, which they carried on doing after the war allowing America to dominate the supply of wheat to the global market.

The final section covers the first half of the 20th century including the First World War and the American Dust Bowl – a result of over-exploitation of the land to grow wheat. Interestingly the Americans identified the problem quite promptly, and started to address it with a programme of converting wheat fields to pasture and planting trees. It finishes talking about Hitler’s very direct policies of starvation, allocating starvation levels of food to non-Germans and Jewish people. He also talks about the horticultural revolution which led to the cold hardy wheat grown in Canada and the Soviet Union, and other northern. It is here that we see most clearly that 6000 years was written 80 years ago – Jacob considers Lysenko, the Soviet biologist, something of a hero and the battle over the health benefits of white bread when compared to more wholemeal bread was still on. These days Lysenko is known as an anti-Darwinist, and for his suppression of opponents through his political power. Obviously the book was written before the further Green Revolution of the 1970s which also impacted the growing of wheat.

6000 years is rather long and rambling but I found it pretty readable and the wider focus made me curious about, for example, the mechanisation of agriculture in 19th century. It is anachronistic in places, and I think in some areas our understanding has moved on.

Aug 04 2025

Book review: A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge

My next review is of A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge. This is a collection of 47 chapters on different aspects of geographic borders. The book is divided into three parts, the first “histories” talks about borders through history, the second on “legacies” is about borders we see today – often the unusual – and how they came to be. The final, shorter, part is on “externalities” – on borders in the air, sea and time. The chapters are standalone so its easy to dip in and out – if that is how you prefer to read – it makes reviewing more difficult since 47 separate stories can’t be summarised in a short blog post.

The histories section starts with the border between Lower and Upper Egypt which dates back to 4th millennium BC. We know this was a border because ancient Egyptian records reference kings of the Upper and Lower Kingdom. Ancient Egypt was divided into administrative regions called “nomes” – like counties – which persisted for the enormous period of 3200 years until the Muslim invasions of 640CE.

It was a revelation to me how recent the idea of a modern nation state is – really just the last 300 or so years, and how the world was not neatly tessellated with states until quite recently. To be fair there are sufficient border disputes to argue that the world is not neatly filled now. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often seen as the birth of the modern nation state – although the written agreement is rather thin on details. The rise of the modern state was a combination of political developments but also improved mapping from the 16th century – accurate mapping being a pre-requisite for establishing borders.

I was excited to learn of the Marcher Lords and the origins of the Marquis title; the Marches are border areas whose lords were given greater flexibility in, for example, raising an army, in order to defend borders. Marquis is the French term for such a lord. The ability to raise an army is a risk to the state – as the Roman Empire discovered on several occasions.

The legacies section talks about interesting borders in the present day. I think my favourite is on the borders in Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau – a Belgian town surrounded by a Dutch one, as a result of the Holy Roman Empire and various feudal lords. It isn’t even as simple as a single boundary – there are something like 30 parcels of land in the town, some as small as 50 metres on a side. There are also a couple of German and Italian towns embedded in Switzerland.

This section also contains stories of accidental invasion, the most benign of these are the Swiss “invasions” of Liechtenstein. These are generally because the border is heavily forested in places and there is no indication on the ground as to the location of the border – these have happened repeatedly in the last 50 years. Other borders suffer more fractious disputes – the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute is in the news as I write.

Bir Tawil on the Egypt – Jordan border is an area the size of Surrey claimed by neither state because to claim it would mean giving up claim on a more lucrative piece of nearby land. This is one of many places where post-colonial borders – often drawn along lines of latitude or longitude – have led to problems in the present day. This is partly because they paid no attention to features on the ground but also because, at the time they were set, the precision with which longitude could be measured was not that high.

Surprisingly this also effects the USA, where in addition to lines of latitude and longitude treaties often contained later-to-be-discovered-vague geographical references. I read a whole separate book on the borders of the US states. The origins of the District of Columbia, where the US capital sits are also discussed – originally this was a square plot of land demarcated for the capital so that no state had an advantage in the federal government, later it lost the land on one side of the Potomac River. In the modern era this has led to an anomaly where the many residents of the capital are democratically under-represented – they only gained a democratically elected mayor in 1975.

The externalities section covers the prime meridian – where the zero for longitude is set, time zones, the international date line, Antarctica, Eurovision, various landlocked countries, maritime boundaries and boundaries in the air and space, or rather the boundary between air and space. It is eclectic, to say the least. I found the chapter on maritime boundaries particularly interesting – I was surprised how recently the law on territorial waters came into force (1994).

This made good holiday reading, it is written in an engaging style and chapters are of a handy length to read sitting in the garden in an hour or so. The sources and further reading section is excellent if you want to learn more about any chapter.

Postscript: I made a note to myself that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia map of Australia was not reproduced in the book, so I link it here. To be fair it would not reproduce well in black and white at the scale of the book.

Jul 11 2025

Book review: The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth

As I enter retirement I have started going to an actual bookshop for my non-fiction reading, The Book-Makers – A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth is the fruit of this approach.

My Goodreads account shows I have read 618 books since I started using the site about 10 years ago – it is fair to say I am a big fan of books.

Smyth’s book is about people who make or made books, divided across 11 thematic chapters. The chapters are ordered chronologically. Books are defined quite broadly, when he talks about Benjamin Franklin (under non-books) he includes newspapers, advertising and bank notes.

The chapters can be grouped into wider themes. The first of these are the technical aspects of printing: printing, binding. typography and paper. The Book Makers starts with Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) who was an apprentice of William Caxton, who introduced the first printing press to England in 1476. de Worde’s contribution was the large number of titles he printed, and what he printed – literature for the masses. The thing that struck me about the printing and binding is that these were distinct process in the early years of print, a customer would buy the printed pages of a book and take them elsewhere for binding. This explains how the books in country houses often have such uniform appearance.

The metal type used to print is a recurring theme, it has its own chapter with John Baskerville (1707-75) and his wife, Sarah Eaves (1708-88) who took over his business after he died. Baskerville was late to printing – his first book was printed when he was 51. His goal was to produce the most beautiful books possible, drawing on his experience in calligraphy and “japanning”. You may be familiar with the Baskerville font which he created in 1752. Later we find Thomas Cobden-Sanderson throwing his type into the Thames so that his business partner wouldn’t get hold of it! Metal type is the heart of printing, and sets of metal type are shared and inherited between printers – this can be traced by the characteristic wear on individual letters which is revealed in the print they produce.

Also in this theme of the technical aspects of printing is the manufacture of paper, something Smyth describes as a neglected area for historical study. Paper production went from 55 tonnes per year in 1805 to 25,000 tonnes in 1835 as a result of the continuous paper production process that Nicolas-Louis Robert patented in 1799. He died a pauper since patent protection was not well-established and he didn’t have the means to defend what was clearly a lucrative idea. This huge increase in production of paper means that it finds more applications – in toilet paper, advertising and flyers. It becomes a throw-away commodity.

There are a group of chapters that talk about publishing beyond the book: cut and paste, non-books, extra-illustration and a variety of recent print innovations (zines, artist books and so forth). The “cut and paste” chapter visits Mary and Anna Collet two women at Little Giddings – a religious community near Cambridge – in the earlier part of the 17th century. Their great work was the “Harmony”, a biblical text which attempted to harmonise the five books of the Pentateuch. It was made by very literally cutting and pasting text (often at the word level) from copies of the bible, augmenting the text with illustrations similarly harvested. This was a work of sufficient quality that Charles II praised it.

Extra-illustration, also called Grangerism, is a similar practice found around the start of the 19th century. In extra-illustration enthusiastic amateurs produced enhanced versions of books by adding illustrations they had sourced elsewhere. The name is after James Granger’s Biographical History of England which helpfully lists all know images of each of the biographical characters it introduces – a book made for Grangerism. I am partial to a bit of a sort of extra-illustration of my own, coincidentally I labelled my post on this Obsession – Grangerism seems to have been an obsession in at least some cases.

There’s one chapter on lending libraries – in particular Charles Edward Mudie’s (1818-90) lending library which was massive in the later part of the 19th century – distributing books across the UK and the rest of the world. Authors not included in Mudie’s library were at a disadvantage in the commercial market. Commercial lending libraries largely disappeared with the arrival of public libraries from the 1920s. I was interested to learn that WH Smith had a lending library, rail users with the appropriate subscription could pick up a book at one station and leave it at another.

Finally, there are couple of chapters on small presses. William Morris had a small press (Kelmscott Press) – but the focus here is on Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and his Dove Press. Morris and Cobden-Sanderson focussed on the retro, printing high quality volumes in small print runs, harking back to the techniques and styles of early printing (and even manuscripts). Smyth notes that the quality of paper, ink and print does not increase massively over the long term but the efficiency with which it can be done increases greatly.

A chapter is devoted to Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press which was active a little later and focused on printing modernist works in small print runs. She attracted some high profile authors before they were famous, and engaged in political activism through her press. Virginia Woolf ran a similar press – Hogarth which still exists as an imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Woolf and Cunard appreciated their presses as a way of publishing their own work. It seems both of them enjoyed the sometimes messy and manual process of book making.

I must admit I found the final chapter on “Zones, Do-it-yourself, boxes, artist books” a bit anti-climatic perhaps because I don’t consider things happening in my lifetime as “history”!

This is an excellent book for people who love books, I found the parts about the early years of printing when the form of the book had not solidified most interesting.

Jun 16 2025

Book review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom

My next review is of The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom, a book I found via a review in New Scientist. It is about the contents of cuneiform tablets, mainly from the library at Nineveh close to Mosul in modern day Iraq. The library at Nineveh was compiled under the direction of King Ashurbanipal who ruled Assyria from 669BC to 631BC. The library was sacked in 612BC by the Babylonians. Cuneiform is a script written by impressing a stylus on wet clay tablets to produce wedge shapes. The clay tablets make an excellent preservation medium particularly when the library containing them is burnt, thus firing them. The library at Nineveh contained 30,000 tablets from a period of over 1000 years – the Assyrians were well aware of this deep history. In total we have about 500,000 tablets written in cuneiform in the Sumerian and Assyrian dialects of the Akkadian language. The contents of the tablets are very varied; there are works of literature, personal letters, instruction manuals for exorcists, medics, lamenters and even a meeting agenda.

The Library starts with a chapter on the cuneiform writing system, it originated in Uruk in around 2700BC descended from earlier, simple tally marks used in the area as early as 8000BC. Cuneiform is a subtle writing system and scribes took pride in both their “penmanship” and also the way the language was used in this respect it reminds me of the written Chinese language. However, it seems writing had a different status than it has now, many of the tablets in the library and elsewhere appear to have been written out as teaching aids indeed elsewhere the practice tablets of students are found as part of the structure of buildings. Poems such the Epic of Gilgamesh are found in multiple versions and stages of “completeness” as it evolved over time. One gets the impression that Mesopotamia maintained a strong oral tradition but specialists had access to written records.

Subsequent chapters cover different themes (The Power of the Gods, Magic and Witchcraft, The Treatment of Disease, Reading the Signs, Messages in the Stars, Literature, The Waging of War, Lamentation), with each starting with a dramatic vignette followed by a discussion in detail about the elements of the vignette and how they fit into wider Mesopotamian culture. I see from their biography that Wisnom is a poet and playwright as well as an academic Assyriologist, I can see how these vignettes and the wider analysis of cuneiform text is informed by this.

To modern eyes the Mesopotamians are bound up in exorcists, gods, omens, signs in the sky – seemingly highly superstitious. However, these are a pre-cursor to modern science – this is very obvious in the case of astronomy where the Babylonians who kept detailed and accurate astronomical records which allowed them to predict phenomena such as eclipses. More widely the search for omens led to a great deal of observation, and the predictions arising from those observations had a logical, internal consistency. They were building a model of the world but based on what we now know to be largely the wrong underlying data.

I particularly enjoyed the section on extispicy – the art of divination via the entrails of a sacrificed animal, typically a sheep and usually the liver of the sheep. The Mesopotamians were very keen on their extispicy, as a measure of this they had names for five distinct parts of a sheep heart but one vague term for the human heart. They had quite a scientific approach to their extispicy, there were written guides and sometimes multiple people interpreted the same liver to check for consistency. The output of an extispicy was a yes/no answer.

Lamentations form a big chunk of the library, these are ritual chants bemoaning a poor state of affairs to the gods. They have two purposes, one is to appeal to the gods for support after a calamity has happened, the other is to describe a possible calamity to the gods as an appeal not to carry out the calamity. There three types of lamentation: balags, ershemmas and ershahungas the first two of these are named for the instruments that accompanied them whilst the third sounds like a more choral.

The book finishes with a chapter on A Day in the life of Ashurbanipal which acts as a handy summary of the preceding chapters and a chapter on the life of cuneiform and Babylonian culture after the fall of the Assyrian empire – the last written cuneiform dates to around 80AD. Reading the book I was puzzled as to why I had not heard more about Mesopotamia but having finished I realise I had, the Old Testament has strong parallels to Mesopotamian myths as do ancient Greek myths. The signs of the zodiac and the way we measure time in hours, minutes and second come from ancient Mesopotamia.

This is quite a big book but it did not feel like a chore to read it. I was struck by the detail in which we know about Mesopotamian lives – certainly those around the King. There is an extensive annotated biography – perhaps learning cuneiform will make a suitable retirement project!