inulro | [Books 2007] Silvertown and Shake Hands with the Devil

Morning all. I am still not recovered from the weekend. Going to Bibliogoths and participating in discussions about actual ideas and forcing my brain to do some work probably took a lot out of me. I'm not complaining though - it was excellent fun and my brain needs more exercise. Anyway:

10. Silvertown by Melanie McGrath
Subtitle: An East End Family Memoir
I have a thing about East End history, until I get to the end of the book where the author bangs on about how it was so much better in the old days because despite the poverty they had a sense of community, leaving out the crime, racism and domestic violence, and romanticising the appalling working and living conditions.
This book isn't like that - it's loosely the story of the author's grandmother, Jenny Page, who was born in Poplar in 1913 and lived to be 96 (which in itself is completely amazing given the lifelong malnutrition and appalling working conditions she suffered). Jenny herself is presented as a very passive person who never really understood what was going on around her. There's one truly gut-wrenching passage - on her 17th birthday, her mother took her to the local butcher who doubled as the dentist, who pulled every single one of her teeth, without anaesthetic, to save her future husband on dental bills. The part where her daughter is confined to a TB hospital isn't pretty either, but from the daughter's point of view it was probably better than being stuck at home and working in the family business with her nasty father. Although the last sentence of the book is "Jenny Fulcher was someone who belonged.", McGrath isn't suggesting this was necessarily a good thing. She doesn't gloss over the nasty side of the old East End. I think the telling quote is, referring to the people who moved out to the new-builds in the first wave of post war slum clearances, "They have a bathroom and hot water and the satisfaction of knowing that when an opportunity came their way they took it".

This is a short & easy read, and definitely worth it if it's your kind of thing.

11. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt. General Roméo Dallaire
Dallaire was the leader of the UN force that was sent into Rwanda to oversee the end of a civil war and transition to peacetime government, but ended up being overwhelmed and under-manned when that transition didn't work out and the country descended into more civil war and genocide, and the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe.

I could write about this for hours, but I won't. Truly harrowing stuff, but very well written and something that people should read, especially given that the region is still unstable.