The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire by Linda Himelstein, HarperCollins, 2009, 416 pages, $32.99.

Not that I’m a booze-hound or anything, but after reviewing the life story of Madame Cliquot, the champagne tsarina (Quadrant, May 2009), I thought it would be interesting to see what the life story of a man of hard spirits had to offer. My interest was also sparked by reading Alex de Jonge’s 1982 biography of Grigori Rasputin, whose life overlapped Smirnov’s, but who—although consuming a fair quantity of Smirnov’s product—managed to make almost no contribution to the Russian economy or the betterment of the masses.

Unlike Rasputin, Pyotr Smirnov (1831–98) was a model of probity, industry and traditional virtues. His life story is fascinating, because it parallels the first great flowering of bourgeois life in Russia under Tsar Alexander II.

Birds in Mind, by Andrew Lansdown; Wombat Books, 2009, 224 pages, $22.

For more than thirty years, Andrew Lansdown has committed himself steadfastly to writing, with poetry a major part of his output. His many books include the popular series of children’s adventures beginning with With My Knife, and collections of essays. He has recently launched a website and has an impressive collection of literary prizes. He has, from his first work, established a distinctive and individual voice.

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, by Dovid Katz; Basic Books, 2009, 512 pages, $30.95.

The objective of this book is to restore the flagging state of the Yiddish language—its past and present reputation and future prospects. Yiddish has long been divisive among Jews. Some deplore it as “jargon”, others love it as the expressive communal language of the Eastern European Jews.

It arose more than a thousand years ago in the Jewish ghettos of German towns, where local dialects fused with Hebrew. The medieval persecutions, restrictions and expulsions there saw mass emigration to the old Polish-Lithuanian state, which then covered a larger area than modern Poland and where the kings welcomed the Jews for their ability to develop towns in these primitive regions.

Other Jews followed and over a millennium a community of 10 million or so resulted. In a multicultural region with diverse languages and shifting borders, a separate communal language was not as unusual as it might seem today.

The Lake Woman, by Alan Gould; Arcadia, 2009, 295 pages, $29.95.

I would like to begin by suggesting (though not insisting) that Alan Gould’s new novel evokes and draws upon three significant sources. The first is the legend of the lady of the lake, which informs Gould’s depiction of the main female character who provides the novel with its title. The second is the model for his main character, Alec Dearborn, which almost certainly is the poet David Campbell. The third, though perhaps the most marginal, is Patrick White’s Voss, which provides—in the form of Laura Trevelyan’s and Voss’s spiritual union and dialogue—a literary antecedent for the telepathic-like relationship between Vivianne Orbuc (Viva), “the lake woman”, and Dearborn, the Australian soldier in British service whom she rescues after he parachutes into a flooded Norman field and nearly drowns. I will take these three sources up in turn.

The Genesis Enigma, by Andrew Parker; Vintage Books, 2009, 320 pages, $34.95.

This book was written by a research fellow who admits that the account of creation in Genesis is scientifically accurate and accords with everything currently known about astronomy, evolution, biology, zoology, and other non-religious disciplines. While this scripture-agreeing-with-science territory isn’t new, it’s new to Andrew Parker, who doesn’t have a religious background and isn’t a religious believer. He didn’t begin investigating the corroboration between scripture and science until his attention was drawn to it by readers of his previous book, In the Blink of an Eye, an exposition of his “light switch theory”, according to which the sudden introduction of vision on earth triggered the Cambrian explosion.

Islands: A Trip through Space and Time, by Peter Conrad; Thames & Hudson, 2009, 192 pages, $45.
Islands are philosophically odd things: they were central to Locke’s bold moves against feudal tenure rights in the eighteenth century which made property transferable from the physical effort put into finding, cultivating and ultimately consuming its produce. Islands are more easily marked by such activities: that is why Shakespeare sets Prospero on one, and Defoe has Robinson Crusoe take possession of his. Islands were a new standard of independence in laying claim to the biggest parcel of land of all, the United States, which is manifestly no island. And they have their unbargained for “subtleties”, as Prospero called them—the power of generating noises, apparitions and events on their own account. Their very names—Bermuda, St Kilda, Ceylon, Spitsbergen—are of great imaginative potency. Islands are subtle enough to become individuals. And not only that: they can become rafts of righteousness—close enough to the “world” for observations to be cast at it, and far enough away from it to evade responsibility for the effect of the said observations.