OFF THE SHELF: JANUARY 2025

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February 25, 2025)

Still an Amazon pre-order until its February 25 release, nonetheless we thought we’d start 2025 with this book since it will be much reviewed and talked about, and is already receiving media attention.

Dr Younis has magically transmuted raw experience into magical prose fiction, written as she says herself with a ‘vile sense of humour’ and in the first-person voice, full of contemporary idiom and unvarnished by undue idealism yet warmly human and ultimately sympathetic. No wonder there was a multi-way auction fight for the book and TV rights. The London-based author has real wasta (Arabic for ‘clout’) in this area. She was raised in the UK by an Iraqi father and Pakistani mother in a strict Muslim environment, studying with Anwar al-Awlaki who later joined Al-Qaeda. She avoided radicalisation and instead went to Merton in 2004 to read History and English. But she understands, perhaps better than anyone, the mechanics of radicalisation and has a lot of empathy for teenage girls who are sucked into it. And that is at the core of this fast-paced narrative where the protagonist has to de-radicalise an ISIS bride but, as you can imagine, it all gets a bit complicated with the undertow of race, class, gender, nationality and, lest we forget, how you survive as a young female in a patriarchal, ideological environment. We’ve taken a look at the book and it's as funny as it is pitch black, as in, the darkest of dark comedy. Younis meanwhile is a hot property – she directed the Task Force on the Future of Iraq at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC and offered strategic advice to US government agencies on Iraq policy. She was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, and her PhD is from Durham. This auspicious first book will be followed by another, we understand, so Nussaibah is on a winning streak with a vital subject. For now: Fundamentally is a jolly good read.

On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd (Oxford University Press, January 2025)

This is more announcement than review, pending an anticipated meeting with the author, former Prime Minister of Australia, current Australian Ambassador to the United States and recent Oxford alumnus in Politics (Jesus College, 2017). But in sum, this is a monumental, authoritative account of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s worldview and how it drives Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage. It addresses, over 650 pages, the question how Xi Jinping is transforming both China and the international order; but also and most importantly, why? We should all be reading this book in 2025.

Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism by Randall Fuller (Oxford University Press, 2024)

An academic work but completely accessible and attractive, especially had you ever wondered that there might have been more to American transcendentalism and romanticism than Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and of course Ralph Waldo Emerson. And of course there was. The author is a professor at Kansas and one of his previous works was about Darwin’s theory of evolution and American manifest destiny (The Book that Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation). Here he writes eloquently about Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody, Lydia Jackson Emerson and – best known by far among these women – Margaret Fuller. Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century and it remains in print to this day. But the focal point here are meetings she held animatedly at 13 West Street, in Boston, a book shop set up by Elizabeth Peabody in the summer of 1840. That gives the broader narrative some coherence, although the author is at pains to point out that there was plenty of disagreement among the women. Nonetheless, ‘At the heart of transcendentalism was a new orientation towards the individual. The movement asserted that God existed in each human being. Its adherents therefore elevated the self to infinite worth. The only obstacle was society – a degrading force of conformity best resisted by immersion in nature.’ The feminist implications and integrity of these women, squashed and diminished by the patriarchy of their age, are still being elucidated, as this book testifies – although there is a terrific bibliographic essay at the end showing that this broader quest is the work of many hands.  

The Universal History of Us: A 13.8 billion year tale from the Big Bang to you by Tim Coulson (Penguin Michael Joseph, 2024)

Confession time: this book was published in mid-2024 and had already garnered the most extraordinary praise, perhaps most pertinently from Richard Dawkins, who noted that while most scientists only know their own field, ‘Tim Coulson is at home with science as an integrated whole,’ adding that the book was ‘a lasting accomplishment.’ Yet such an ‘everything’ book had this reviewer doubting his own competence to comment on it. Well, we can confirm that it is written in wonderfully accessible language so there is no need to be afraid of the science. It explains the history of the universe and nearly explains our part in it. Coulson, Professor of Zoology at Oxford (that stupendously successful department at the University, past and present) cannot explain why something exists instead of nothing, but all the supernatural and religious alternatives start to look very threadbare, a matter he is compelled to touch upon at the end.

How did he do it in just over 400 pages? His method starts with autobiography and a brush with death when he caught malaria as a younger man. Since then he’s been gathering his evidence to try and tell the entire story of life, leaping over the mechanisms (the ‘how’ – this would fill whole libraries he says, in very technical language) – and focusing instead on the broad processes. How did a ‘pinprick of extraordinarily hot energy’ ‘transform itself over billions of years into you and me, extremely complex organisms built from trillions of cells working together?’

If there is one ultimate turning point moment in the book it is where he reminds us of the three laws of thermodynamics and then says that the second of these, (‘that systems tend to become more disorganized and less ordered over time’) seems to contradict our own evolution. ‘The history of Earth and of you and me appears to contradict this second law, yet all reputable scientists accept it as correct.’ The solution here is to consider the entire universe as obeying the law in general, but humans on earth, or rather earth, with humans present, not obeying it. There follows an unbelievably brilliant summary analysis of quantum mechanics so as to show how particles are also waves and that this, on balance, points to elements of stochastic, rather than deterministic existence, the latter otherwise foreclosing any freewill whatsoever because everything we do would have been preordained by the conditions of our existence. He does then add in the genetic mutation consideration that I think most biologists take for granted. He also reminds us that ChatGBT relies on random numbers, which in turn goes back to his doctoral work on seed predation by squirrels (yes, really) that resulted in a better-than-Elon algorithm embedded in a computer programme called Turbo Pascal. But let’s deflate ourselves gently. Our freewill isn’t deterministic but we only feel ‘special’, Coulson argues, because our existence is down to luck. Double the special and double the luck, if you went to Oxford. Still, the book is a sort of miracle even if that’s emphatically the wrong word. Everyone should read it. There is deflation as you come off the mountain, mind, because it would seem that there isn’t much left to explain.

Folk Tales of Old Europe by John Weeks (Austin Macauley, 2024)

The author (Brasenose, 1967) tells us that he achieved a not to be sniffed at First in Classical Mods – before switching tracks to English. He then worked as a social worker, becoming the Director of Social Services in Shropshire. He was struck by the fact that people relate meaning through story-telling, even and despite the advent of digital whatnots and attendant brain rot. Here we have a rather marvellous compilation of European folk tales, carefully collected through travel and research over a long, loving run of time, and re-rendered here as the author has seen fit. The publishers have done well to contain so much in a handsome volume of nearly 400 pages. The collection starts in Poland; then Norway, Slovenia, Scotland, Italy, Ireland, England Germany and France. There are misers, priests, swindlers and liars, poisonings, castles, giants and ballads. Someone asked John what the relevance of folk tales could be in 2025, his reply simply that ‘In these dark days there is something to be said for moments of escape,’ then quoting William Morris,

‘Who strives to build a shadowy isle of bliss

Midmost the beating of the steely sea.’