Books in the Media: biography of Michael Lynch compels critics
This week, books examined the state of our planet and included a biography of Michael Lynch and a wintry retelling of an Irish legend.
The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire (Macmillan Business), journalist Katie Prescott’s “excellent, meticulously researched” biography of “unscrupulous” businessman Lynch, who died last year when his yacht capsized in a storm, was reviewed by Charlie English at the Guardian. Prescott “sets out in pacily written detail” the “sequence of near-impossible coincidences” that followed a fraud trial that acquitted Lynch and Steve Chamberlain, the vice-president of finance at Lynch’s company Autonomy. Writing for the Financial Times, Jonathan Guthrie hailed the biography as “timely”, adding Prescott “has created a highly readable book that pivots on accounting conventions”.
How to Save the Amazon (Ithaka), by journalist Dominic Phillips and completed by his “journalistic friends and colleagues” following his murder by the gunmen from an illegal fishing operation he had been investigating, was selected by James Walton at the Telegraph. Phillips decided to write about the ways in which the Amazon Rainforest can be protected, exploring a wide range of possible solutions “from the kind of indigenous practices that have preserved the rainforest for thousands of years to the help that could be offered to the Amazon by governments, corporations and NGOs across the globe”. Walton explains: “By the time of his death, he’d drafted four of his 10 chapters and made notes towards the others.” It is a “noble project” that “triumphantly” achieves one of its aims: “Philips comes across as a vivid, thoughtful writer and a thoroughly decent man.”
Joy Williams’ “slim latest collection” of short stories The Pelican Child (Profile) was called “death-haunted” by the New Statesman’s Neel Mukherjee. “One of the cohering threads of the book [is] the depredation of the planet and the destruction of our fellow creatures.” Mukherjee continued: “Eco-consciousness is too on-the-nose, even crass, a term to bring to a discussion of this bleak, metaphysical, elusive book but there is no getting away here from the endgame of climate change, nor the singularly aslant and unimaginable ways Williams comes to it. The world in these stories is a desert depleted of timber and ore, of water; of an Earth extracted of its resources; of the Great Barrier Reef dying; of all days being unbearably hot.”
The Times’ Lucy Bannerman called Sophie Kirtley’s Swanfall (Bloomsbury), a “delightfully fresh update” of the ancient Irish legend the Children of Lir, a “gentle mystery for older primary-school children”. The story follows Pip, who is left alone in his cottage for the weekend and where, one night, he hears noises in the woodshed and thinks he sees an injured girl dressed in white. “Swanfall manages to capture the kind of magic of a great winter walk. As soon as you’re finished you’ll want to pull on your wellies and stomp outside in search of the wild places, where all you can hear are honking geese, winter waders and the sound of wind in the reeds.”
