Andrew Taylor
Uncharted Waters
The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea
By Jordan Goodman
Faber & Faber 347pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The English Dane
By Sarah Bakewell
Chatto & Windus 324pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
It’s refreshing, and unusual, to pick up a couple of books about travel and exploration that don’t leave the reader feeling slightly battered and inadequate. Who are these people who fill the pages with their determination, bravery and derring-do, and who greet each new disaster and discovery with a finely turned and incisive comment in their diaries?
Well, in these books we find out that the heroes are often no better than we are. The senior officers and scientists on board the Rattlesnake, as she headed for the southern seas in the mid nineteenth century, found little better to say about Madeira – for many of them,
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'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
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