I would not be a queen for all the world

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. Harper Collins e-books. On Kindle.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2000.

This review was written on August 1st 2012

Six books, each divided into chapters. Details of individuals listed at the beginning of the book relating to each of the six sections of the work. It starts with the Cromwell family in Putney in 1500 and we are introduced to the principal character. Thomas Cromwell.

This book was recommended to me. It had won the Booker Prize and was a reminder of the particular difficulty the Kindle reader is faced with in certain circumstances. It was a lengthy book with many characters and with a very detailed account of the political aspects and history of England at the time of Henry V111 and the start of the Reformation. The people involved in her account include many more than the principal characters, the King, the leading political and titled figures, Cromwell and the Cardinal. They make for some confusion for the Kindle reader because of the problems of seeking a glossary to identify them. However, these Kindle problems may be largely caused by my own limited knowledge of the potential of the medium.

Mark Rylance as Cromwell in the 2015 BBC drama 

The author rarely uses Cromwell’s name when describing his first person single – it is only used when others are addressing him. This can add further to the confusion and to the tedium for the Kindle reader. The book does convey the conflicts and the circumstances of the break with Rome and of the King’s obsession in seeking a male heir, at the cost of his marriage to Katherine. The gradual break between the King and his supporters and with Cardinal Wolsey is dealt with at length, mostly in the words of Cromwell, and leaves the Cardinal a sad figure that apparently died before his likely execution.

Cromwell awaits his close up

What does emerge from these pages was the grim social and personal circumstances of 16th century London, the recurring epidemics of plague with its massive loss of life and the horror of its striking so rapidly and suddenly. Also the sense of the uncertainty of life at that time and the brutal methods which were in vogue in the execution chamber and which were not unpopular as a spectacle among the people of London.

Anne Boleyn awaits something else.

This is a long book and I must confess that I fast read most of its pages after the first quarter of the text. I can absorb the general content of such a book in this way but hardly enough to justify my writing a reliable critique of the author’s work. Nor would such a review be worth attempting because of its fictional background. I gather that this may be the first of a trilogy dealing with the reign of Henry V111. His period in the history of England and the huge significance of the Reformation provide an appropriate and historic setting for the author’s pen.

Hola, soy su líder.

The Penguin History of Latin America. Edwin Williamson, Penguin Books, 1992. Read in Kindle.

This review was written on February 1st 2013

The book deals with Columbus and his arrival in the islands of the Caribbean and his later visits there and of the problems which he and his followers encountered. It describes the disastrous effects the Spanish conquest had on the local population, particularly in terms of violence, killings and land occupation. Despite some protests from some of the clergy, the behaviour towards the natives was described as scandalous.  Many of the Spaniards were hard-bitten men whose expectations of wealth were often not achieved and whose behaviour had not been influenced by the traditional discipline of a national army. Nor was Isabella’s demand prohibiting slavery adhered to. In addition, the high mortality among the Indians was greatly increased because of their lack of resistance to smallpox, measles and other exogenous European epidemic diseases. 

Some of the Spaniards hoped for quick rewards; few received them and there were no rich deposits of gold although the visit to the West was strongly related to its possible wealth in these foreign lands. The Spaniards also suffered badly from the tropical diseases which were foreign to them. Of the 1,500 men who travelled with Columbus in 1493 only 360 survived to 1502. Half of the 2,500 who arrived with Nicolas de Ovando a few years later were dead from ‘’a mysterious disease’’.

In pesetas Cortes was worth about six Euro.

Later chapters deal with the conquest of the mainland.  The Spanish invasion of Mexico was led by Cortes in 1519, seventeen years after Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean.  The history of his exploits is somewhat confusing and it is difficult to know how much of the detail was based on reality. The underlying feature was the destruction of the native tribes, of Montezuma and the Aztecs, and other tribes in the Mexican  area.  It was more than just the brutish exploitation of the Indians; it was the almost total destruction of the local tribes over the next generation or two. 

Clearly Cortes was the outstanding leader of the early Spanish landing on the mainland. Despite his relatively small number of soldiers, the surprise of the Spanish arrival, their strange equipment, horses and ships, and the mythical powers attributed by the Indians to such strange visitors, the local habitants were certain to yield to the ultimate success of the Spanish.

Pizarro was the outstanding leader in the early 1500s who led his company of adventurers into Ecuador and Peru and to the destruction of the Inca tribes. It was in about 1529 that he and Diego de Almagro planned to set out for Peru and the Inca country on the west coast of South America.  Pizarro was described as no gentleman nor was Almagro described as any better. It was they who were the moving force in the conquest of Peru in the 1530s and it was Pizarro who was appointed the Governor and Captain General by the Spanish Crown; and it was he who fought and defeated the Inca tribes, ably assisted by the chronic turmoil which was inherent among the Incas themselves. Inca society was largely destroyed within a generation or two although some of the more wealthy Incas managed to survive the Spanish occupation and gradually merged into the mixed population of Peru and other South American countries. Many histories of the Incas have been written by Spanish and other authors but one must have serious doubts about the veracity of these as writing did not exist among the Incas and related tribes, and accounts were obviously based on tradition and word of mouth.

Pizzaro, worthy of his own stamp.

Although no formal army was ever sent by Ferdinand, the King of Spain, and his successor to conquer the Western possessions, all the islands and much of the mainland, including the Mexican area, the Central American countries and all of the northern and eastern parts of South America soon came under the control of Spain thanks to the arrival of many shiploads of ambitious Spaniards seeking adventure, gold and land.  And the quite numerous local tribes, including the Aztecs and Incas, had little protection from the equipment of the invaders, the ships, the firearms, the horses and the natural energy, brutality and foreign diseases of the invaders. It is no wonder that such a vast and settled area and so many settled races were destroyed within a few generations.

The Spanish conquest had been virtually completed by a relatively small group of adventurers by the mid-1500s. By the mid-century they had extended from Peru to Bolivia and Chile in the south and to Columbia and Venezuela in the north before the steam of the Spanish conquest began to peter out with their slower spread to the more southern countries of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.  No permanent Spanish interest was paid to the east of the Andes at or below the Amazon basin where Portugal gained the huge area of Brazil. Nor was there any great interest shown to North America, largely because no discoveries of gold or other sources of wealth were found there and the Spaniards were faced by the constant opposition of the many local tribes. Florida, California, New Mexico, Kansas and a few other southern parts of the current United States were occupied to some extent in the early years. The Spaniards never achieved firm possession of these areas apart from leaving many place names. The Spaniards were dominated later by the arrival of the French, the English, Scots, Irish and other northern Europeans as they spread to the South and West of the United States.  

The fabled lost city of Gold

In all the writings about the Spanish conquests of South America the emphasis all the time was seeking gold everywhere. They called it El Dorado.  It was the legend of the lost city of gold – El Dorado.  It was something that whetted the appetite of the Spanish adventurers ever since the time that they first arrived in the Caribbean. It was gold that turned a race of men into the destroyer of fellow men and of other races of people.  Although gold was scarce on the islands, there was sure to be much on the continent. The parish next door was thought to be full of gold and of other sources of fabulous riches. 

Orellana's golden death mask

The name Amazon was derived from the name given by the first European ever to travel down the Amazon to the Atlantic – Orellana was his name and he talked about the female warriors and it was he who called them Amazons and led to the origin of the name of the river.  Orellana was the first person in history who crossed the Andes from Ecuador. Not through any fault of his own, but because he got lost, he found himself on a tributary of the Amazon. He finished at the Atlantic Ocean on the island of Hispaniola.  There were equally fruitless Chimeras of wealth and glory shared by all the Spanish conquerors and which involved them at times with amazing feats of heroic endeavour in search of gold and wealth.  In the mid sixteenth century the Spaniard Coronado pressed into the southern states of North America and went up as high as the Mississippi and up as far north as Oklahoma and Kansas.  The outstanding feature for the Spaniards who invaded the lower parts of North America was the lack of any evidence of wealth, gold or anything worthwhile.  The result was that the North American states was of no great interest to the Spaniards and eventually the centre of North America remained very sparsely populated until the middle of the 19^th century when they were taken over by Anglo-Saxon settlers migrating from the Atlantic seaboard, just as South America, east of the Andes was full of rain forest and sun baked savannahs and remained virgin territory until the early 19th^h century.  The pampas of Argentina and the wastes of Patagonia further south, like the prairies and deserts of North America were largely shunned by Spanish settlers until the 1870s. 

The book gives a good potted description of the gradual extension of Spanish influence in the West but emphasises that there was a gradual decrease in Spain and Spanish influence in recent years.  Many parts of South America remained uninhabited and many of the Indians of the sub-continent remained active and populated parts of the countries untouched by the Spaniards, such as Argentina, parts of Chile, Paraguay and the southern parts of the subcontinent.

Wonder woman, a plastic Amazonian

Unlike the United States and Canada, with their adherence to the principles of democracy and the law, the more southern parts of America north of the equator and all the countries of South America have had a long tradition of political instability. I expect that there are more than a few factors in their history which accounts for this. The history of their genesis under the Spanish conquest must have had a profound and long-term effect on their delayed adherence to democracy as we know it in most European countries. One factor was surely the rapacious behaviour of the Spanish adventurers; another the complexity of government of such remote areas by the King and government in Madrid; the very mixed basis of white, Indian and black of diverse nationalities, and possibly the dominance of the Catholic Church with its strong political role in the affairs of the new countries and its conflict with the ‘’superstitious’’ beliefs of the native tribes.

I have not read any book or article about the Portuguese occupation of Brazil. This is an odd omission in my history. My review of The Andes and the Amazon refers to many isolated and mostly primitive tribal groups scattered along the river and its tributaries and where one finds only settlements or small towns of mixed basis as one comes closer to the river’s mouth.

Machu Picchu - the' lost city of the Incas'.

This book finishes with a potted description of the pre-Columbian tribes of the Americas. The author divides their history into four periods corresponding to separate ‘’stages of cultural development’’ – Archaic (7000-2500BC), Pre-Classic (2500BC to AD1), Classic (AD1 –1000); Post-Classic (1000-1500).  Information based on his views must be speculative but the important message to learn from these speculations is the gross instability of society and the absence of older literature about pre-Spanish days. Today may not be any different. If we are to achieve perfection in this world through the ultimate and permanent achievement of the perfect society, we can hardly be happy about the ups and downs of the tribal society of the Americas nor can we be reassured by the history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, nor can we hope to achieve perfection through religion. The most convenient religion I can study is Catholicism because of its well documented history of two thousand years. Can we say that some of the horrors created by the Church and by its leaders have led to a better world and to a more rational human society? Can the obsessive grip about possessions, about ‘’standards of living’’, about the worst aspects of globalisation, about acquisitiveness - never denied by our pastors - be rational if this selfish and self-indulgent philosophy is held with total disregard for the welfare of our neighbours and our natural surroundings on which we depend?

(Ed. The Spanish title of this blog is courtesy of Google translate - apologies to Spanish linguists if this is somewhat incorrect!)

A book I have not read

Ulysses, James Joyce.  Penguin, London, 1969. First published in Paris in 1922. pp 719 SB.

This review was written on January 13th 2012

(Editors Note - I am truly baffled as to why some of the print in the following blog is lager in parts - or smaller. I have tried my best to rectify this but in the interests of my own sanity and that of my family, I am accepting that which I cannot change. I'm afraid that what you see is what you get. In any case, I am assuming that you are primarily here for the content, not for the display.)

I bought this book for 6.00 Euro from Greene’s second hand book list on 28/10/2011. It is a paperback. It had no name of the previous owner and was in good condition. It may well have not been fully read in the past. I never had Ulysses in my library nor was there one in my father’s library. It is highly unlikely that my father would have read Ulysses or indeed to have acquired it. It is also unlikely that I shall read it in full or even in part as I failed to get through more then a few pages on the one or two occasions I tried in the past. In fact I recall some years ago borrowing a book from my brother Seán which was published to explain Ulysses. And which was itself difficult to understand in parts. I never finished this either. And this is the first time I have attempted to review a book without having read it.

Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) in action

The last 17 pages at the end of the book, written by Richard Ellmann as an introduction, are worth reading and give an excellent background to the history of Joyce’s masterpiece. Ellmann states that Joyce as a boy had described Ulysses as his hero. Joyce was apparently searching for a mythical prototype in a Dubliner. Ellmann postulates in his introduction that Joyce’s wanderings on the Mediterranean Coast reminded him of Ulysses. He refers to Joyce’s meeting with Nora Barnacle in the first days of the new century and about the same time occurred his quarrel with St. John Gogarty and their sojourn in the Martello tower in Sandycove.

Although Joyce intended to write his biography while still a young man in Dublin, its composition did not start until 1914, ten years later. It was a year of great productivity for Joyce. In that same year he had drafted his play Exiles, published Dubliners, wrote his prose poem Gracious Joyce, and completed the last two chapters of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

There were many other incidents during his early days in Dublin which are incorporated in Ulysses. Speaking of Bloom, Ellmann states "Making the central Dubliner an Irish Jew, a man not entirely accepted in the city of  which he is so much a part, reflected Joyce’s ambiguous feelings about his own role in his native city". I was hardly through three or four pages of Ellmann’s review when I had the impression that Joyce showed symptoms of paranoia and that this trend was associated with an understandable degree of ambition. He was using Ulysses’s travels around the Mediterranean as a model for his hero Bloom’s peregrinations around Dublin.

Many Homeric elements are described by Ellmann as perils which are allegories of events for those in the Dublin of the early 20^th century. There are many parallels between events in Dublin to those which are described in the Odyssey. He started to write his book after he had studied Homeric scholarship in   great detail and in several languages (he had studied Greek while in school) and he kept in close touch with Dublin and his family in his obsession that all details of the city were correct in his narrative.

By 1917 the first chapters of the book were written and were presented to the editor in London, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had great difficulty in finding a publisher willing to accept the commission. Ellmann gives details of the many difficulties encountered by Joyce and his supporters in dealing with printers and with the authorities, particularly  in the United States, difficulties which were compounded by the banning of the book in  that country.

The first full printing of the book was arranged by Sylvia Beach, an American who had befriended Joyce in Paris in 1920 and who had established the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris. She arranged the printing of 1000 copies, a limited de luxe edition, which, although those which reached the UK and the USA were immediately impounded by the authorities, received tremendous praise by a number of well-known writers and literary people in France and England. Valery Larband, "the most informed French critic of English literature" was struck by its merit and later wrote "I was raving mad about Ulysses. Since I read Whitman when I was 18 I have not been so enthusiastic about any book --- it is wonderful! As great as Rabelais! Mr Bloom is an immortal as Falstaff." Many others were equally enthusiastic although there were some who were baffled.

Having read the many reactions to Ulysses and such praise by eminent literary people, it occurred to me that I ought to have the appreciation and the insights to understand Joyce and to read Ulysses without the response of utter bewilderment which I received in the past on starting the first few pages. It is possible that the Valery Lablands, with their wider knowledge of literature and of Greek and Greek legend than I, had greater insights into Joyce’s mind. Certainly, now that I am in my ninety first year, it is unlikely that I would succeed where I had failed during my earlier and more perceptive years. I am reminded of the Irishman speaking to the Austrian in Vienna who was enthusing about Ulysses. "What did he see in it. It was only a story about Dublin". "Ah no" the Austrian replied "It was about Vienna".

Perhaps if I were to read it now and to enjoy it at the age of 91 years it would be an acid test of my surviving cognitive abilities! I am left a feeling of shame that I never  read Ulysses because I cannot avoid the sense of having missed one of the great works of my own countrymen. Certainly my six years in Coláiste Muire with its intensely patriotic and Catholic ambiance, would have been without its self-indulgent patriotic library or its curriculum nor would I have expected to find it among my father’s bookshelf.

29^th July 2013.

I had found the Penguin second hand copy of the edition of Ulysses in my study yesterday and it occurred to me that my yearning to have read Ulysses still existed.  The comments I made in 2012 were largely based on the addendum in the book by Edward Wilbane who provided 17 pages which I considered worth reading at the time and which gave an excellent background to the history of Joyce’s masterpiece.  On the 28^th of July, 15 days after my 91^st birthday, I was inspired to read the book as one of my last efforts and despite the fact that my  reading had greatly deteriorated.  I determined on that day to read at least 25 pages every day and hopefully to complete the book later in the year.  It includes in all, 919 pages of relatively small print, including the addendum by Richard Elman.  On the 28^th of July, I read the first 30 pages and was determined to read at least 20 pages every day until the book was finished.  It was to be a form of prayer, which, as a child, we were instructed to practise and convunicate to Our Lord every day of our lives.  Surprisingly I found the first 30 pages quite amusing and entertaining and I enjoyed the mixum gatherium of the conversation which took place between Buck Mulligan, Steven Daedalus and the English man Haines.  These first pages take place in the Martello Tower in Sandycove and by the end of the first 30 pages they had arrived close by in Sandycove swimming.  When I talk about a mixum gatherum I mean that it was full of apparently irrelevant words and phrases, of Latin tags, of fractured pieces of Dublinese and irrelevant references and yes, there was a thread about the first 30 pages, which gave me the sense of meaning without being absolutely sure of what I understood.  I had read 30 pages on the first day and that was the end of my reading. 

Seán McBride

Seán McBride – That Day’s Struggle. A Memoir 1924-1951. Recorded and edited by Caitriona Lawlor. Currach Press, Dublin, 2005.

(Caitriona Lawlor, was Seán McBride's secretary from 1977 to 1988)

The following review was written on December 31st 2005 and was published in the Irish Times

Seán McBride was the only son of John and Maud Gonne McBride. He lived in Paris for the first fourteen years of his life. His mother was barred from entry to Ireland by the British because of her separatist views. His father was executed in 1916 following the rebellion.

It is not surprising that McBride was committed to the republican ideal with this family background. He opposed the Treaty on grounds of partition and the oath. Like many opponents of the settlement, he had little insight into the ineluctability of partition. He arrived in Ireland in 1918 and, despite his youth of 15 years, he acted as a messenger for the Sinn Féin and military leaders during the War of Independence.  He spent the entire civil war period in jail. He remained in the IRA after the civil war but his activities were confined to defending dissident republicans who were charged under the Offences against the State Act.  He was appointed chief of staff of the IRA for 18 months in 1936 but claimed that he was only appointed in a caretaker capacity and was opposed to violence against the state forces.

In 1961 MacBride became the first director of Amnesty International

He was instrumental in forming the Clann na Poblachta party in 1946. He was Minister for External Affairs in the first Inter-party Government in 1948. This Government was defeated in 1951 following the Browne controversy and because of mounting economic difficulties. He refused a cabinet position in the second inter-party government and lost his Dáil seat in 1961. Thanks to his French background and ministerial contacts with British, European and American leaders, he became involved in international affairs at a high political and social level.

His family background determined his early and uncompromising political views, but shifts in political attitudes made him an enigmatic figure. His memoirs read as the spoken rather than written word and terminate at the time of his retirement from the cabinet in 1951. His views on several controversial issues are largely based on self justification and he tends to be dismissive, patronising and even embarrassingly personal about his opponents. He takes more credit than is consistent with the facts for such events as the formation of the inter-party government, the passing of the External Relations Act, Ireland’s departure from the Commonwealth, and the new and enlightened economic policies of his government. His views on these and other issues cannot be accepted without appropriate research and documentary evidence. He provides none.

His interests extended beyond his remit as minister for external affairs to such areas as forestry, waterways and the railway system. He tended to lecture civil servants and to interfere in other government departments, thus not always endearing himself to colleagues. In his capacity as an energetic minister for external affairs and during his subsequent career abroad, he undoubtedly helped to counteract the insular attitude of the post World War Irish. Later, after retiring from national politics, his career was distinguished by many important contributions to European unity and to the human rights movement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, an irony not lost on some of his opponents.

McBride’s emerges as a man of energy with a wide interest in social, economic and political affairs. However, he also emerges from his own writings as a man of unusual vanity, less than charitable to his opponents, happy in the company of world figures, consistent in seeing himself in a favourable light and without providing the necessary evidence to allow historians take an impartial view of his contributions to recent Irish history. 

This hungry editor is sated once more

Typical writing attire.

Thoughts on reviewing books

This was written in 2012

At the time of my retirement in 1988 I became more interested in general writing.  During my professional years I did frequent reviews for the medical newspapers.  Then and later I did occasional reviews for the Irish Times and the Sunday Independent.  It was later, at the end of the millennium, when I was more than ten years retired, that I thought of reviewing all books I read as an academic exercise.  I have now collected about 140 reviews. None were on fiction. I had first read fiction in my early adult years when I discovered the vast store of sixpenny paperback Penguins, fiction and non-fiction. They were the basis of my real education.

The thrill of being a scholar...

Since my return to Ireland after four years in London as a postgraduate student and after my settling down in Dublin in 1950 after my appointment to St. Vincent’s Hospital, I became so absorbed in medical reading and subsequent medical epidemiology that I stopped all general reading and fiction and devoted my time to medical subjects only. Despite my widespread general reading after I retired from my hospital work in 1988 I never returned to the reading of fiction.

Most media reviews we encounter are straightforward and are published to inform the reader about the book’s content.  My reviews tend to be less specific in their purpose, often but not always impinging on my own special interests or prejudices.  My choice of reading tends to be eclectic with books chosen by chance or by being lent or by hearsay.  My interests are in all aspects of life but not in any specialised subject although there is an emphasis on recent Irish history because of my family’s close involvement in the revolutionary days of the early 20^th century. My father had been the head of the Irish revolutionary army from March 1918 to May 1923 and the political head of the army from January 1922 to March 1924.

Trying to practise what I was preaching

During my professional lifetime as a practising cardiologist in my two hospitals – I was also a physician to the Coombe Lying in Hospital – I became involved in research into the coronary epidemic which emerged worldwide in the later 1950. It emerged in most advanced countries like a thief in the night. It was to involve me later in much travel and international contact during the international programme aimed at controlling the epidemic which stabilised by the 1980s and began to subside by the end of the century, thanks largely to identifying cigarette smoking. Heavy cigarette smoking had become widespread during and after the World War of 1939-1945.

Much had been achieved by the time I had retired from my epidemiology days. This research has been a major part of my work and that of my close colleagues at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin. Despite some references in our work to other heart subjects, coronary heart disease during my active days accounts for the bulk of our research. It was a worldwide programme in searching the causes of the morbidity and mortality of the epidemic and has been rewarded by the huge fall in coronary disease in our countries and the great increase in longevity which we are now enjoying in the world.  

Coláiste Mhuire Parnell Square. Abandoned in 2004

As an aside I have to say that I had a rather poor secondary education.  The revival of the Irish language was part of the policies of the new Irish government. My father was a devoted lover and speaker of Irish. He was a minister in the 1927-1932 cabinet and he was largely responsible, with a ministerial colleague, Ernest Blythe, in establishing an Irish speaking secondary school in Parnell Square in 1928 under the direction of the Christian brothers, an important teaching order which provided secondary education to the Irish after the Catholic Emancipation. I learned to speak the Irish language but in retrospect I can say that other subjects, including English, history, Latin and mathematics were on the curriculum, but the teaching and the speaking of Irish received priority and this emphasis can be judged by the results of my leaving certificate and by my success in leading my class in pass Latin with a mark of 41%, a level which just allowed me to join the medical faculty at University College Dublin at the age of 17.

However, I was fortunate that, about this time, I was introduced to the popular sixpenny Penguin paperbacks which over subsequent years were to provide me with a wealth of fiction and a huge source of non-fiction. I became devoted to these treasures of entertainment and of information and I have little doubt that my many hours of Penguin reading has been the most important source of education during my earlier years. Some of my children were also influenced by the paperbacks and, between my own library and that of my daughter’s, Barbara, we hold about 600 of these paperbacks in our libraries. They are still a valuable source of entertainment and information   provided by the writers of the early 1900s and their predecessors.

Should you keep notes or quotes whilst you are preparing a review?  Should you dictate or write a review as you read the book?  Should you permit fast reading or skipping of the text?  On reflection the best approach is to jot down reminders while reading which may contribute to the final review. It is best completed when the book has finally been read and perhaps after some more time to think about it. 

I have seldom had recourse to fast reading or skipping.  It tends to disturb the easy rhythm of the reading habit. But where you have a book of more than 400 pages where at least half is devoted to details of military and other specialised areas, as in my review of Khartoum, you might be forgiven for skipping through some pages. Skipping does leave a general impression of the skipped contents and can add to the final text.

In the final analysis, the satisfaction I have had in doing reviews is based on life in general, in expressing my own views and prejudices, and the benefit it may have in adding to my knowledge and retaining the gist of the book’s content. Without the review one’s memory of a book’s content can fade with the passage of time.   Time spent in writing and completing a review cannot be measured in terms of hours or days. The review may be completed shortly after finishing the book or may be delayed because of further thought and because of possible additions and deletions.  

Going out for a walk can be recommended; apart from its health contribution. Walking provides a good opportunity for reflection about your current book review.  No matter how you feel beforehand, you will always feel better after a walk and a walk alone under agreeable circumstances can provide a fine opportunity to think about your current review. It also may give the wandering mind ideas for another review. It is not uncommon that a rambling and a casual thought can, after reflection, lead to a blog which may be welcomed by a hungry editor.

A man for all seasons

The Turnstone - a Doctor's Story. Geoffrey Dean, MD, FRCP, FRCPI, FFCMI. Liverpool University Press, 2002, 

This review was written on November 22nd 2002 and added to in 2008.

Geoffrey Dean was born in England in 1916 but spent the first half of his professional career in South Africa where he practised as a consultant physician in Port Elizabeth. He moved to Ireland in 1968 when he was appointed head of the newly established Medico-Social Research Board. His appointment was earned because of his outstanding interest in and research contributions to epidemiology while living in South Africa. His autobiography combines the story of his personal life with an account of his internationally recognised work in medical epidemiology. The book will be remembered most for his contributions to the epidemiology of porphyria, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, histoplasmosis and lung cancer. Chapters on these subjects make fascinating reading and confirm his gift of combining slow painstaking collection of data from many sources and countries with serendipity, a feature not uncommon among those who have contributed to outstanding scientific progress in medicine and medical progress.

Dean spent 18 years as Director of the MSRB which was established by Erskine Childers, Minister for Health, in 1968. This modestly funded government agency, of which I and a few colleagues interested in public health and health promotion were members, did, under the leadership of Dean, an immense amount of work in dealing with topical social and public health problems which then prevailed in Ireland. His account of his years here will bring back many memories of the circumstances which prevailed here and the excellent record of the Board and its director during the Board’s relatively short life. Like his colleagues on the Board, he failed to understand the decision of a later Minister for Health, Barry Desmond, who discontinued to support the Board and who merged the MSRB with the newly constituted Health Research Board. As he and the Board expected, subsuming the MSRB into an organisation largely controlled by consultants and academics had the expected effect of diminishing the volume of social and public health research and intervention which was and is still urgently necessary in this country.

One chapter records his two years in Bomber Command in the UK after he qualified and the grim casualty problems he had to deal with. Another was his narrow escape from imprisonment by the authorities in South Africa because of his protest about the treatment of prisoners during the Apartheid period. He was one of the very few South African doctors to protest. He describes the support he received in his defence from colleagues abroad and particularly from the members of the Royal College of Physicians in London.

Dr. Dean's account is an important contribution to the medico-social history of Ireland and to the history of medical epidemiology world-wide. He follows in the tradition of the great British epidemiologists in the past who were also practising doctors.

I am adding the following text of my obituary of Geoffrey which was published in the Irish Times in 2008 shortly after his death at the age of 92 years.

Geoffrey Dean, an Appreciation.

Doctor Geoffrey Dean was the first director of the Medico-Social Research Board from 1968 to 1986. He had a remarkable medical career  first as a practising physician and neurologist, and later as a world renowned medical epidemiologist. He was born in the British Midlands in 1916 and qualified at Liverpool University in 1943 after schooling at Ampleforth. In 1947, after two years serving in Bomber Command and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians, he emigrated to South Africa where he established a successful consultant practice in Port Elizabeth. In Africa he became interested in porphyria and published a book on the subject based on his remarkable researches into the disease which he traced back to the family which introduced the malady at the time of the Dutch settlement in 1685.

Dean and the Queen

His researches into porphyria led him to his wider epidemiological researches into multiple sclerosis, Friedrich’s ataxia and other neurological diseases, as well as lung cancer and histoplasmosis. His autobiography was published by the Liverpool Press in 1996 and provides details of his role as an internationally acclaimed medical epidemiologist. A major interest was his research into the epidemiology and genetic background of multiple sclerosis. He was closely associated with both the Irish and British Multiple Sclerosis Societies.

Dean’s first visit to Ireland was in the early 1960s when he was asked to investigate the causes of lung cancer in Belfast and in the surrounding countryside.  However he left South Africa in 1968 to become director of the newly established Medico-Social Research Board in Ireland. During his 18 year career as director he conducted inquiries into some of the most pressing social and health problems in this country. They included the growing drug culture, the alleged Sellafield role in causing Down Syndrome (which his investigations refuted), the alcohol culture and its role in cancer and other diseases, agricultural workers’ health problems, the psychiatric services, mental retardation and suicide, and many other medico-social problems. An immense amount was achieved by him and the Board on a shoe-string budget. Both he and the members of the Board greatly regretted that the successful MSRB was subsumed into the newly created Health Research Board shortly after Dean’s retirement.

While in Ireland he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth, University College, Dublin, and the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland.  He had an Irish grandmother on the distaff side.  Her genes must have had some influence in deciding his move from South Africa, where he had a successful consultant practice, to Ireland, a move which was to facilitate his burgeoning epidemiological research and which was to evoke in him a love and pride in his adopted country. 

During the tenure of his appointment in Ireland and up to his death, he continued his international researches. He contributed an immense number of articles to peer reviewed journals, and his last paper on the genetics of multiple sclerosis was published in the American journal Neurology in 2008. A later paper on porphyria and epilepsy is in press.

The long awaited memorial to those of Bomber Command

In chapter 13 of his autobiography he quotes Claude Bernard, the French physiologist ‘’The study of things caused must precede the study of the causes of things’’. He was highly educated and was an excellent and stimulating companion, but his modesty and his constant preoccupation with his researches and publications left little time for socialisation, at least in the public sphere. He was fortunate in the support his received at all times from his wife, Maria, who, by her loyalty and affection, patiently tolerated the many hours he spent in his study and in travel. To her and his extended family in South Africa and Ireland we proffer our sympathy. To them, and to his colleagues and those who knew Geoffrey well, he will be remembered with affection, and with a sense of pride and admiration because of his contributions to the wellbeing of humanity. Like Thomas Moore, whom he admired as his patron saint, Geoffrey was ‘’a man for all seasons’’.