ASK Musings

4 Stars

Best for:
Those interested in forensic anthropology. Not for those who find the discussion of death (and specifics surrounding the investigation of it) to be traumatizing.

In a nutshell:
Forensic Anthropologist Black shares her experience with the dead and the living.

Worth quoting:
“If we cannot influence it, perhaps we shouldn’t waste precious time worrying about it.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve been interested in the field of forensic anthropology for awhile.

Review:
If you’ve read my reviews a bunch of the years (or if you know me in real life), you’ll know that for a time, a major part of my job was planning for the response to mass fatality incidents in King County, where Seattle is. Part of that involved working closely with two colleagues, one of whom was an amazing forensic anthropologist called Dr. Kathy Taylor. She died a few years ago, and I miss her. She was amazing to work with, and shared with the author of this book something other than a career field: she cared deeply about those she encountered through her work, and wanted to do her best to ensure families were reunited and the unidentified were known.

The author of this book, Sue Black, works out of Dundee, in Scotland, and has had a fascinating career. The book covers her life and her work, interweaving personal stories with some well-known ones. She talks about training in anatomy, and her own early experience with death in her family. She also shares how she handled the deaths of her parents.

One chapter deals with how identification is made, using age, sex, ancestry and stature. She handles the topic of sex v gender extremely well in my opinion, and talks through why, for example, it’s much easier to determine the age of a child through bones than it is to determine the age of an adult.

She has had a storied career and helped many people, including traveling repeatedly to Kosovo to help identify victims in that conflict, as well as pushing the UK to develop a world-leading capability in disaster victim identification. The chapter on that was one I found most interesting, given my background.

The book has some gentle humor but is always respectful of the living and the dead. She talks a great deal about reverence and respect for those who donate their bodies after death so others can learn (that’s on my list, though the university I currently have listed is about 6,000 miles away, so I should probably update that), and also shares interesting nuggets of wisdom. For example, I learned than anyone with a tattoo (I’m included there) may have ink in their lymph nodes? Fascinating.

3 Stars

Best for:
Fans of nature writing that also has a background story.

In a nutshell:
Author Boothby became fascinated by author Gavin Maxwell and the life he lived in Scotland, and spent time living where he did.

Worth quoting:
“…a genius doesn’t necessarily make for an easy person to live with or to know.”

“For once in my life I knew what it was to have purpose. Up until then, my life had been goal-orientated, which is all very well, but once you achieve a goal, or fail, what then? Set yourself up with another? Set yourself up to win, or lose? Over and over?”

Why I chose it:
I love Skye and the Highlands and pretty much all of Scotland (it’s why I live here now), and I also enjoy quality nature writing. Plus, otters!

Review:
There are two different books in here. Not literally, but there are stories that are related, and some parts are fantastic and other parts are more challenging.

Boothby read one of Gavin Maxwell’s books at a young age, and became enthralled with the life Maxwell led. I’d never heard of Maxwell before reading this book, but he’s apparently a well-known author who was also an unpleasant man who took in wild animals and kept them as pets. He was a complicated man by all accounts – the kind that people write books and stories about, even though as individuals they were probably deeply unpleasant to spend time with.

Maxwell lived in the West Highlands, and author Boothby decided to make a pilgrimage there many times, finally settling down there temporarily to serve as caretaker to the lighthouse and former home of Maxwell. He lived in a studio attached to what was turned into a holiday cottage that is rented by tourists, and gave tours while also keeping up the land. He looked for otters, and tried to commune with the spirit of Maxwell in that space.

The Maxwell storyline led to the book being written, and provides a bit of a connective tissue throughout, but the parts of most interest to me are the descriptions of the area and the people beyond Maxwell. Boothby discusses the old lighthouses and how they were staffed and maintained, about the challenges of living in harsh conditions. He describes the land and the weather and the plants and animals in ways that one could picture. That part of the book is intriguing and what kept me reading; the Maxwell bit much less so.

I might have given this book four stars, but at one point Boothby describes two women on a yacht as ‘blubbery.’ Come on dude. Unnecessary and also just bizarre choice. Which then makes me wonder about the author even more than I already had.

3 Stars

Best for:
Fans of the genre.

In a nutshell:
Jane Finn has some important war-related documents. Unfortunately, she has been missing for years, and even though The Great War is over, those documents are important. However, through a few seemingly random interactions, friends Tommy and Tuppence end up trying to track Jane down.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’ve been enjoying her books and plays, and so placed holds on whatever the library had, and this was the first to become available.

Review:
I didn’t enjoy this as much as the The Unexpected Guest, but it was still an interesting read. I think one of the challenges for me was that there were quite a few characters that I had some trouble recalling exactly who was who, and how they were related to each other. I also knew I had to accept the premise of these important documents about the war, but it was hard to understand exactly why they mattered so much since the war was over, so the sort of … desperation everyone had to get a hold of them didn’t make tons of sense to me, but I have a feeling I just misunderstood or didn’t catch the part where it was explained.

As usual, there were a few twists in the book, but unfortunately one of the main one’s I had figured out very early on in the book. Probably just a lucky guess, but when it was eventually revealed, instead of feeling like ‘oooh, go me, I figured it out,’ I felt a bit disappointed. Not what one hopes for in a book. I did, however, enjoy the language. Most of the books I read are at most 20 years old, but this book was written over a century ago, so it’s interesting to hear the word choice and the style of speaking.

This was Christie’s second ever book, so I can see why it might not be one I enjoyed as much as others, but it was still worth the read.

4 Stars

Best for:
Cat lovers. Those who enjoy a slightly melancholy, but also hopeful, look at everyday life.

In a nutshell:
Five individuals seek assistance from a mysterious clinic.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
My sister gave it to me for Christmas. She knows me well.

Review:
I read most of this book in one sitting – where I am, 2 January is also a holiday, and I enjoyed the return of sunny weather by sitting indoors devouring this sweet book.

The book is broken down into five stories, featuring six cats and five humans who are in need of some help in their lives. One hates his job and says he wants to know how he can just get on with it as he needs the work. Another is a sexist man who feels diminished at work and in his home. The third is a woman who is dismissive of her young child’s concerns. The fourth is a woman who runs her own company and is tired of being the only one who does everything the ‘right’ way. Finally, the last is a woman who has lost her own cat.

Each person finds their way to the clinic via recommendation, but not directly – it’s always a friend of a friend’s cousin or someone they run into at work who recommends the clinic. And the prescription is always the same – a cat, for a week or two. And the cats do help – but perhaps not in the expected ways.

Two days ago I celebrated the 13th anniversary of ‘gotcha’ day of our two rescue kittens. We moved them across the world with us, and they are the center of so much joy (the cuddles! The playfulness despite their age!) and frustration (the puke! The multiple visits to the vet each year!). They’ve been in my life for nearly a third of it, and it’s wild to even imagine them not being here. I love when a book like this can capture how important cats can be in the lives of their caretakers.

2 Stars

Best for:
I cannot imagine anyone other than a new Lewis Hamilton fan finding this book interesting.

In a nutshell:
Lewis Hamilton shares his journey to Formula One, ending at the end of his very first season as a Formula 1 driver (so 1985-2007, essentially).

Worth quoting:
“But I do not want to be the Tiger Woods of motor racing – just being the Lewis Hamilton of motor racing will be cool enough for me.”

“It is mostly mental energy that you are losing; you must try not to empty ‘the bottle’ of your own energy to keep everyone else happy.”

Why I chose it:
This was my partner’s Christmas gift to me this year (we always just do a gift for the home, and then exchange one book on Christmas Eve) because I have somewhat recently gotten into F1, and my favorite driver is Hamilton.

Review:
It is unfortunate to start out with such a critical review for 2025, but I am still happy I read this book because I did learn some things about Hamilton. For those of you who aren’t aware, Lewis Hamilton is the 7-time World Driver Champion of Formula 1 (and should have been an 8-time champion, but that’s a whole other story). He’s also the only Black driver out of 20 on the grid, and the only Black driver in the history of the sport (out of 805 drivers). He’s outspoken about a lot of issues such as racism and LGBTQ+ rights. Of course, he’s also (now) a multi-millionaire.

Like a lot of folks, I came to know F1 via Drive to Survive, a documentary on Netflix. But I didn’t learn about the series until maybe its third or fourth season, and I didn’t start actually watching F1 in real earnest and following it until I think 2023, when we realized our Now TV subscription included live coverage of all the race weekends. Now, my partner and I are all in. As an early birthday present my partner gave me the giant LEGO Mercedes F1 car, which took awhile to build and is, frankly, so cool. We spend race weekends watching practice, qualifying, and of course the race. When my sister and her partner were visiting over the summer, we basically forced them to watch the British Grand Prix, which was especially amazing as Hamilton won it. I play football (soccer) on Sundays, so often I’ll miss the race and will come back to the changing rooms to see a play by play series of text messages so I still can experience it. And yes, I’m aware of the negatives of F1 – the sportswashing, the politics, the money.

With all that as preamble, this was the perfect book to get for me in theory, but unfortunately it is not a well-written book. I think the responsibility for this lies with the editors and the ghostwriter employed to tell Hamilton’s story, because it reads basically like a bunch of interviews strung together and edited only to remove any sense of drama from it. Hamilton was 22 at the time it was written, and he is not a writer. I’ve mostly only read sport autobiographies written by women (Megan Rapinoe, Hope Solo, Abbie Wambach, Caster Semenya) – but whether those were ghost-written or not, they were definitely better than this one. I even wondered if it was perhaps a young adult or even child’s edition but no, it seems to be just the standard copy that was printed.

The book follows a linear time line after the introductory chapter, and gets into Hamilton’s young life and how he got into karting and then professional driving. There are interesting parts about his young life, his education, and his relationship with his family, given his parents divorced when he was so young. He credits his father with so much of his own success, but there are a lot of allusions to how hard his father was on him.

Because I wasn’t watching F1 during Hamilton’s start, I didn’t know much of anything that happened during his rookie year (like, th fact that he nearly won the World Driver Championship that year!), and that section of the book flowed a bit better. He covers most of the races, and addresses the ‘Ferrari issue’, which I didn’t know about and had to look up online before it was explained. I also wonder how Hamilton feels about some of the things he shares now that many more years have passed – talking about how cool it was to meet P Diddy (yikes), and giving over a paragraph to how much he enjoyed being on a talk show with David Cameron and how he wasn’t really into politics (double yikes). But also, like, what 39 year old would look back at every decision he made at 22 and think ‘yep, totally nailed it’? Certainly not me…

So far I’ve read two F1 books, and neither has really been great. I’m not sure if its the quality of the (ghost) writers, or if folks just haven’t figured out how to write a compelling motor sport book, but I think a biography would probably be more interesting to read than this memoir, at least while Hamilton is still a driver. If he decides to write a complete memoir after he retires, I will certainly read that, though hopefully he’ll work with a better ghostwriter and team.