Andrew Barrow
A Time for Wassailing
This light-hearted, scholarly book offers a multifaceted portrait of Christmas over two thousand years. Rich in facts and trivia, it takes us all the way from the birth of Jesus Christ – only mentioned in two of the gospels – up to the consumerist society of today, when Christmas is celebrated all over the globe by millions not even nominally Christian. In the process, it embraces mince pies, mistletoe, the Christmas tree, Christmas cards, carols, candles, declining church attendance and – on a massive scale – food and drink.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3