Johnny Cash - The Life by Roger Hilburn

There was much more to the man in black than his stage persona revealed. This well-written and thoroughly-researched biography by LA Times journalist Robert Hilburn traces Cash's development from youth to old age and ill health with remarkable sensitivity and warmth.

The central focus is the evolution of Cash as a musician. From a boy who loved to sing gospel songs with his mum - to a man strumming his guitar with air force pals - on to starting a garage band and eventually after thousands of miles touring across America, a spell of super-stardom before the inevitable fall.

Hilburn goes into detail about most of the songs ever written by Cash and quotes many of the lyrics at length. This really brings his subject to life and it's a joy to read song texts penned by Cash. If you know the songs you will certainly hear his voice and music in your head as you read. Seeing the lyrics on paper it's clear that Cash is a storyteller and poet of great style and wit.

Here are the top 5 new things I learnt about Cash reading this book:

1. His Christian faith played a huge part in his life. He regularly read the Bible and even wrote a book about St John. Despite this he almost never went to church.

2. He wrote Walk the Line for his first wife Vivian. He tried to remain faithful to her and was terrified of separating from her. In the end, it was she who filed for divorce.

3. His return to the music charts with the album American Recordings in 1994 owed a great deal to the inspirational work of music producer Rick Rubin who reinvented Cash at the height of the grunge movement.

4. He was in an incredible amount of pain and on a cocktail of about 40 pills a day as he recorded his last albums with Rubin. Sometimes he was so out of breath that his voice was reduced to a whisper. Engineers had to piece his last songs together from hundreds of takes.

5. Cash was a terrible driver and was in many car accidents. Once he crashed a camper van in the middle of a national park. He ended up by causing a wildfire in which scores of endangered eagles were killed. He got off with a hefty fine.

Of course the book also covers the drug addiction and the famous prison concerts with panache, but there is so much more to Cash and therefore the book than that. An added richness is the cultural context which Hilburn lucidly paints from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century.  This book sits not only within biography but within the historiography of 20th century music - doing Cash justice as one of America's biggest musical icons of the last century.

Drive On from the album 'American Recordings' (1994) is one of the lesser known songs by Cash that I discovered whilst reading the book. He was a prolific artist.

Book review: The Fat Years

Shanghai-born author, Chan Koonchung

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

First published in Chinese in 2009 by OUP, Hong Kong as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013

English translation by Michael S. Duke, 2011

318 pages, £6.50 on amazon.co.uk

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung has been billed by some as the Chinese Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the novel has been banned in China, it is far less radical than George Orwell's masterpiece that was first published in 1949.

 
Koonchung's story is set in the China of 2013. Whilst the rest of the world languishes in economic depression, China has forged ahead to a 'Golden Age of Properity'. As Old Chen sips his Lychee Black Dragon Latte in the local Starbucks, it barely crosses his mind to question his own feeling of contentment or that of anybody else around him. On the surface, everybody is happy.

It takes several encounters with old friends before he seriously starts to suspect that something is wrong with reality. First, the spiritual traveller, Fang Caodi, insists that a whole month has been wiped from people's memories. Second, Chen's ex-girlfriend Little Xi is constantly shadowed by undercover agents because of her internet activism.

The story follow's Chen's somewhat rambling path to unveiling the truth. Along the way there are plenty of essayistic style dialogues with wizened Party official, He Dongsheng. Although these offer interesting perspectives on Chinese history and politics, they clog up the action.

In the end, the book is more philosophical treatise, than straight thriller. Is it better to live a lie and be happy or live in truth and be unhappy?

German Wikipedia in book form

Forget your laptop, forget your blackberry and smash up your i-phone, because soon you'll have all the information you need at the flick of a page. Well, if at least if you can read German and let's face it, who can't?

Full of composite words such as 'Zeitgeist' ('Zeit' = time, 'Geist' = spirit), it takes only half as much time to learn German as any other language. And on top of that, it's so logical, isn't it?

So make sure you pre-order your copy of Das Wikipedia which is due out in September. Factually checked and colourfully illustrated, its a snip at 20 Euros.

The free online lexikon will print 50,000 of the site's most visited subjects.

So we can expect poppy entries on Carla Bruni, Tokio Hotel and Playstation3. Time to flog those dusty Britannica's at a carboot methinks.

Book review: 'Snow' by Orhan Pamuk

Snow by Orhan Pamuk
First published in Turkish, 2002
English translation by Maureen Freely, 2004
436 pages, £5.99 on amazon.co.uk

‘Snow’ is a beautifully written and very human novel. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk explores religion, politics and art with a set of passionate characters, but the story is mainly about one man’s search for love and happiness.

That man is called Ka. He is a poet who, after years of political exile in Germany, returns to Turkey. He travels to Kars, posing as a journalist sent to investigate the suicides of the so-called ‘headscarf girls’.

Headscarves were banned at the local college, and people believe this is why several ardent Muslim girls committed suicide. But Ka talks to the locals and finds that other reasons probably led the girls to do it, such as the brutality of their fathers.

Thick snow falls and all the transport routes to the remote town are cut off. As the town is hit by a military coup, Ka falls madly in love with Ipek, daughter of the 'enlightened' hotel owner, Turgut Bey.

Interesting characters and wry humour illuminate this novel. For example, Serdar Bey, the editor of the local newspaper, publishes the next day’s news before it happens. And the Islamic extremist Blue is a complex character who stands out for both his brutal conviction and his gentlemanly wiles with women.

Poems come to Ka as if by divine inspiration, and we see him furiously penning them in a public toilet or at the kitchen table. Pamuk alternately pokes fun at artistic pretentiousness and celebrates the electric rush of pure creativity.

Pamuk often digresses from the main plot but this only makes the novel richer. Some books you can’t put down, but I often put this book down just to savour what I had read and to avoid reaching the end too soon.

Kars and its people finally make Ka realise what he wants from life. But at the same time he does not want to shake off the solitude and depression that he knows so well. Will Ka leave his lonely poet’s world for love? Or will raw emotion overtake him?

Potty about Potter

JK Rowling is obviously potty about Potter, and fair play to her.

I've never read a Harry Potter book, or seen a Harry Potter film, and never plan to either. So my immediate reaction to the news that Rowling is suing superfan SV Ark for publishing a Harry Potter Lexicon in print was - so what?

OK - Rowling wants to publish her own HP Lexicon. So what? Surely fans will still prefer a lexicon from the original author than some geek. Maybe, Rowling really is worried that her lexicon might turn out to be less authoritative than Ark's. Once, she even confessed to occasionally using his online encyclopedia as a reference.

And with £500 million plus in her bank, how could she possibly be worried about Ark's book hurting her sales. Does it come down to principle then? Certainly, Rowling has conjured this card out of the hat too.

Both author's have been in tears over this, so the dispute must be about more than money.

Why shouldn't a fan, get obsessive about some other person's work, and then be allowed to publish a useful reference guide about it? Beats me. I would be flattered.

A smidgen of jealousy might have coloured my view regarding one of the world's most successful living authors, but I feel somewhat validated by the judge's legal perspective. U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr. called the so-called 'world' Rowling had created 'gibberish'. And he probably had to read some of her stuff.

Why is everyone in the real-world potty about Potter apart from me and U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr.?

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Picture: 'Rappi Notter' the Ukrainian translation of Harry Potter. Sounds better, don't you think - kind of sordid.