Reviews Articles
Be Patterns: An illustrated Advices and queries, by Jenny Vickers and Brett Fletcher
‘Sing and rejoice, ye Children of the Day and of the Light; for the Lord is at work in this thick night of Darkness’ wrote George Fox in one of his epistles (Quaker faith & practice 20.23). The musician Jenny Vickers, in collaboration with the artist Brett Fletcher, was inspired by...
After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond, by Bruce Greyson
It was just a wasp sting, but the evening before an early morning flight was not the best time to discover I was allergic. When the ambulance crew arrived they could not immediately find my pulse. Fortunately, after a couple of adrenaline injections and two hours in A&E,...
Sorry About the Mess, by Heather Trickey
I’ve been wondering whether this book should carry a warning, like those you get before a movie begins: ‘Swearing, violent emotions’; ‘Readers may find some poems distressing’; ‘May cause choking from laughter’.
Still Love Left: Faith and hope in later life, by Michael Jackson
This 100-page book is an essential for our ageing Society. It will be an invaluable asset to our elders and ‘caring and supportive Friends’ (or whatever is replacing the name of overseers), or just anyone who is approaching later life with some trepidation. It changed my view from fearing the...
Stories from Palestine: Narratives of resilience, by Marda Dunsky
I have been visiting Israel and Palestine since the early 1980s. It has been an emotional journey. There was the buoyancy I felt when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, when there seemed to be grounds for hope. Since then it has been a challenge to express any optimism.
The Struggle for a Human Future: 5G, augmented reality and the internet of things, by Jeremy Naydler
One of the many consequences of the pandemic has been that we have become increasingly dependent on technology to connect with one another. I have found my smartphone and Zoom essential. But I have also been aware that this increasing interaction with technology may also impact on our lives in...
The Spymaster of Baghdad, by Margaret Coker
The spymaster of Baghdad is Abu Ali al-Basri, who was the head of counter-terrorism for the national intelligence agency in Iraq. His unit, the Falcons, had a spectacular record of success against Islamic State during the prime ministership of Nouri al-Maliki. Over the course of sixteen months, it stopped thirty...
The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, and Death: The end of self-improvement, by Joan Tollifson
According to William Hazlitt in his 1827 essay ‘On the feeling of immortality of youth’, ‘No young man believes he shall ever die. Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do.’
How You Can Save the Planet, by Hendrikus van Hensbergen
When young I read The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, a visionary work from 1953. This was a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, widely seen as having launched the environmental movement. I remember the exhilaration of reading about this man who quietly and single-handedly reforested his land,...
Epiphanies: Poems of liberation, exile and confinement, by Harvey Gillman
Some readers will know that Harvey Gillman, much-respected author and speaker, has always been a poet.