Brian Schofield's Place - Finding Great Non-Fiction

On the Blog

Brian Schofield — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:43:05 +0100

Wrote this piece for the Guardian website. Funny thing, blogging for a newspaper website. You can't ever forget the fact that you're going to get some stick - a piece of knowledge that undoubtedly affects your writing. You either try to pre-empt the agressive, spiteful stuff (don't think that's true strong a word, even if the spite is casually delivered over the lunch-break) or you try to stir it up, to impress the editors with how many replies you get. Neither strategy helps you write the truth as you see it. It might be the future of something, but I'm pretty certain blogging isn't the future of great writing.....

Book reviews

Brian Schofield — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:37:14 +0100

I've recently started reviewing for the Sunday Times. It's a fantatstic new writing experience, properly challenging and with a real sense of responsibility - I know all too well that most authors put their life and soul into their books, and are almost totally reliant oncritics for publicity, unless they're celebs. So you don't criticise lightly - nor, though, can you dismiss your gut feelings. If you aren't enjoyinga book, the only explantion you can reasonably posit is that the book's not enjoyable. The temptation to be kind, and put it down to a bad lunch or a hangover, is great, though! Anyway, here's a couple of my reviews, for A Single Swallow, by Horatio Clare, which I'm afraid I didn't enjoy, for Philip Parker's The Empire Stops Here, which was an interesting experince - I'm no postgraduate classicist, so was the slght boredom my fault or his? Anyway, it's an incerible effort of a book, so dedicated. And finally, a bit of fun - a CIA Spycraft history. Boys with toys!!!
But the book I'm currently recommending to anyone who will listen is The State of Africa - a history of fifty years of independence on the continent. Simply magnificent, like taking a tablet that helps you see the truth at last. What an achievement of a book.

A salutory lesson

Brian Schofield — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:37:45 +0000

Here's a 'teachable moment' for any writers making the transition from print to the blogosphere. Yesterday, Arena magazine was formally closed down, and I wrote a blog post for MediaGuardian on the mag's demise - I've written for the title, on and off, for nine years. It was a disastrous error of judgement on my part, a hugely regrettable mistake.

Because, while I absolutely stand 100% by everything I wrote in the piece, it turns out the timing was nothing less than ghastly. I thought the staff of Arena had been resigned to their fate for at least two weeks - I'd been sure of the mag's imminent doom since mid February - but it turns out that they'd actually been told just a few hours before my piece went online. They were, understandably, furious - I've been part of two magazine closures in my time, and it's such a horrible experience that I can only guess how infuriating it must have been to see a friend and former colleague kicking through your bones within a couple of hours of getting the bullet. What was meant as a pretty frivolous piece came across to them as rank opportunism and insensitivity. The moment to publicly, and pretty harshly, discuss what did and didn't happen at Arena obviously wasn't yesterday afternoon.

I can only apologise to my friends and colleagues, for whom I have the highest professional respect and personal admiration. Arena was consistently the best written consumer magazine in the country, for the whole time I was lucky enough to be involved. (Though no apologies to Dylan Jones, at GQ, who's big and ugly enough to take a joke).

And if any student journalists do stumble past this site, this is a salutory lesson. The average magazine feature takes around two months to get from an idea to the printing press. A weekend newspaper feature - two weeks, on average, I'd say. A feature in a daily newspaper's features section - sometimes it's a real rush job, but I think the average would still exceed two days. This blog posting, from a single sentence pitch to being written, subbed, headlined and posted online for eternity - TWO HOURS. Leaving no time at all to discuss your thoughts with someone able to warn you that you're off on the wrong foot, or to point out a consideration you've not yet reached. This is a fact, not an excuse - but it simply, honest to God, didn't cross my mind during those two hours to consider the feelings of the men and women sat in the office soaking up the news tht they'd been canned.

So, be warned. I've made a right pillock of myself here, and I've learnt my lesson. Sorry again, guys.

My review in the SundayTimes, of a modern classic

Brian Schofield — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:07:35 +0000

Just a fantastic piece of writing this. Not my review, the book....

The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper
Cape £16.99 pp260

The Sunday Times review by Brian Schofield

Cameron Doomadgee died from internal bleeding on the floor of his prison cell on November 19, 2004, after his liver was sliced in two across his spine. The degree of force required to cause that kind of injury is normally associated with a high-speed car accident or a plane crash. The 36-year-old Aboriginal Australian, moaning for help as he lay dying, also had four broken ribs and further wounds on his face, skull and hands.

There were only two possible explanations for such horrific injuries. Either he had been beaten to death (as an eyewitness testified) by Sergeant Chris Hurley, his home town's senior police officer; or, as all the policemen in the room testified, Doomadgee and Hurley had both tripped on a step, and Hurley had toppled onto Doomadgee (who, despite having fallen forward, had somehow landed on his back) with sufficient downward force to tear open an organ.

This may not seem, on the face of it, like the most challenging case in criminal history, but there was a considerable complication. The killing - or the stumble - had taken place on Palm Island, a lawless, desperate corner of northeast Australia where the rules of the Wild West still seem to hold sway. And, most important, Doomadgee was a drunk, unemployed “blackfella”, while Hurley was a white, dashing, all-Australian male. And it's the tension and resentment between the two cultures these men represent that provides Chloe Hooper with the combustible fuel for The Tall Man, a gripping, heart-stopping piece of true-crime reportage.

Palm Island, Hooper explains, is “a kind of tropical gulag” off the northeast coast of Queensland, where around 2,500 Aboriginal people live in a maelstrom of poverty, alcohol and dysfunction. Unemployment is 92%; male life-expectancy is less than 50 years; the suicide rate is triple Australia's national average.

When an inquest was then convened to further debate the case, the Palm Islanders appointed the campaigning Burmese-born lawyer Andrew Boe to represent their interests, and he brought Hooper along to chronicle events. Adopted by Doomadgee's family as “our writer”, Hooper spent the next two years investigating what had happened on the morning of November 19 - and also uncovering the reality of Doomadgee and Hurley's bruising frontier lives.

While admirably honest about the impassable divide between herself and the Palm Islanders as she traces Doomadgee's brief, gloomy biography, (“I felt incandescently white”) Hooper is keen to capture the reality of life in a broken indigenous community, glimpses of magic and folklore cropping up among the addiction, domestic abuse and constant calendar of funerals. The tall man of the title is a malevolent spirit who is said to live in the island's mountains, feasting on the reliable supply of the Aboriginal dead.

Just as enlightening are Hooper's visits to the beer-soaked, bar-brawling white settlements that also occupy back-country Queensland: “The last outposts of racists, crocodile hunters, war veterans, hermits, and every kind of heathen.” And home to people such as Hurley - white doctors, teachers, social workers and particularly policemen, who gain Brownie points and promotions for volunteering to bear the white-man's burden of Aboriginal community work, while running their distant outposts as personal fiefdoms.

The sluggish investigation into whether Hurley killed Doomadgee finally sprang to life in January 2007, when Hurley became the first Australian policeman to be charged over an Aboriginal death in custody. At which point Hooper's narrative finds another gear, as mainstream white Queensland enters the scene, looking startlingly ugly: pathologists who hadn't bothered to examine the victim's skull, investigating officers who'd had dinner with the prime suspect on the evening of the crime, spineless local politicians standing behind “the best police service in the world”, and, least attractive of all, the Queensland Police Union. Aided by a lazily complicit media, the union turned the handsome, matey Hurley into a local hero, A Cop Who Cared (take a bow, the Brisbane Sunday Mail), who was being stitched up by Australia's liberal elite. The self-pity, thoughtlessness and contempt for the legal process shown by the union is so gruesome that when Hooper mentions a roomful of beefy, uniformed policemen signalling their support for Hurley by all raising their arms “at a 45-degree angle”, the detail doesn't seem gratuitous.

Queensland's police force - along with its tourist board - won't thank Hooper for The Tall Man, but the rest of us should. This meticulous, compelling portrayal of the dark side of Australian life deserves the widest possible audience.

Where features go when they die....

Brian Schofield — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:00:37 +0000

I wrote this feature for the New Statesman last summer, and there were all sorts of staff changes and shenanigans, ...

Destined for glory

Brian Schofield — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:00:00 +0100

Chris Jone's feature in the recent Esquire, 'The Things that Carried Him Home" is going to pick up more than a few awards - and anyone who wants to be a features writer, or tells themselves they are a features writer, should read this and discover just how high the bar can go. Great writing, astonishing reporting - and, it must be said, what looks like a pretty supportive American magazine expenses regime (almost extinct in the UK) - combining to blow you away. I can't believe that a piece of work as valuable as this is available free online...

Unrecognised minor classic

Brian Schofield — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:02:26 +0100

Just tearing through Mark Kurlansky's "Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea", which appeared in 2006 to widespread critical silence. It's a fantastic book, an entertaining and methodical polemic against our commonplaces about the unavoilability of violence in human conflict.

But even accounting for the fact that it was slightly off his usual marketplace - his big hits have been food-based history books, on Cod, Oysters and Salt - this book was very quietly received. Was this because it felt a bit do-goody? Or simply because, oddly, it was so darn short? I'm guesing 60,000 words tops, less than a James Bond novel - and subsequently feeling flimsy to the literary eye, perhaps? There is a paradox in here - getting readers to FINISH a book, particulalry argumentative non-fiction, is a real challenge (so often, I just read the introduction, agree with its claims, and set the book aside) but lengthiness is seen as a sign of gravitas, scholarship and scope. So our shelves buckle beneath works we've 'sort-of read', enough to comprehend and concur with.

With pamphleteering essentially dead, it would be nice to think 40-60,000-word non-fiction books would have a real place today. So many of my favourite works of fiction are tiny - Heart of Darkness, The Fall, The Outsider, Slaughterhouse 5, The Code of the Woosters (!) - a tightly-argued slither of non-fiction could surely be just as impactful. Kurlansky's certainly is - all the more impactful, in fact, for being so easy to finish and to recommend. But in the brutal economics of the bookshop, is a £13 hardback, for just over 180 small pages plus notes really going to attract many buyers? Perhaps the short non-fiction book is simply defeated by economies of scale...

Anyway, I heartily commend the book, now in paperback, to you...

2008's most important feature so far...

Brian Schofield — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:04:20 +0100

It's toured the internet many times over, but I thought I'd stick it up as a mark of respect, if nothing else. Matt Taibbi's The Chicken Doves in Rolling Stone explains how the Democrats have tried to prolong the Iraq War until election day '08, while looking like they've been battling to bring the troops home. The UK press has giving this argument very little air, but I expect them to catch up when a book called The Uprising comes out in mid-May. Most intruiging, it seems this effort has been coordinated by Democratic Senators and their aides. Know any famous Democratic Senators?

A great find

Brian Schofield — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:47:07 +0100

Newspapers tend to feel, with some justification, that they need anniversaries or contemporary resonances to run history-based articles, but it can be so rewarding when they do send a writer back into the archives or to interview elderly participants in past events. Research has shown that many people wander away from complex contemporary stories specifically BECAUSE the don't understand the history behing them - Israel, Zimbabwe, the former Soviet Union, etc.

Here, John Huxley of the Sydney Morning Herald interviews someof the first non-white immigrants to Australia, pioneers in the painful process of a country becoming multicultural. Fascinating stuff - and the British, inevitably don't come up smelling of roses. British passengers on the first multi-national immigrant ship demdaned their own dining room, as it was 'an insult' to ask them to eat with foreigners! Lovely stuff...

Book of the Year

Brian Schofield — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:13:25 +0000

I've been on my hols, and can return with verdicts on a few of the expected books of the year. First up was Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is such an important, debate-leading book, but will it really change the world if it's physically impossible to carry? It's so long, it's a test of physical strength and mental endurance, clearly designed to beat an entire economic world-view (free-market corporatism) into submission. Personally, I think a brave editor might have mentioned to her that books CAN start popular uprisings, but only popular books - so shall we trim a few chapters? It's interesting to wonder what an editor would have done with the same manuscript submitted by a debut author - I haven't gone near the Harry Potter books, but enthusiasts report that they got flabbier the more cash they made...

Regardless, The Shock Doctrine is probably as close as anyone born in the 1970s will ever get to reading the Book of our Lifetime, the chronicle that explains how we got here (and, uncomfortably, why we're so rich) so I heartily suggest you battle through it (in paperback!)

Another contender is Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, whose writing on poverty in the UK is part of the reason why I became a journalist. Again, it's a hugely important book, but the scale of its target (the English-speaking media) is so great, and the editing so lax, that the fantastic passages of genuinely shocking revelations come padded with repetitions and digressions that really deserved a trim. Others have suggested the book contains profound innacuracies (I would suspect not) but in a telling revelation of how the British view non-fiction, few critics have noted that it needs an edit.

At least Davies does acknowledge, at the end of the book, that he holds out little hope that his tirade will change anything. That attitude would certainly make editing a book much easier (it doesn't matter, just let the writer run free) but says something rather disconcerting about modern polemic non-fiction. Is it written to generate the warm feeling of righteous anger, or to generate change?

Incredible graft

Brian Schofield — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:10:33 +0000

It's always impressive when someone puts in enough work to change your mind. Like many Brits, a residual adoration of Bill Clinton - the second most popular man on earth, I'd guess, after Mandela - had me backing Hillary for 08. Then I found out more about Mr Penn, her cheif advisor. In a past life, I worked in the Burston-Marsteller group that he's CEO of, and there is no way on God's Green Earth a political leader of vision and principle would listen to the advice of the man that runs that shop. Seriously, working for the smoking lobby, while pitching universal healthcare to America? An insoluble paradox. Ari Berman in the Nation gets the plaudits, read on...

Words and pictures

Brian Schofield — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:03:46 +0000

Probably my favourite feature article of the last couple of years, this - about Bolivian lady-wrestling! And check out the slide-show of incredible photos. On the spot reporting, brave commissioning: "Right, boss, I've got a story about lady wrestling in the La Paz shanty towns...." and great quotes. The writer, of course, speaks Spanish - in a different life, had I known I was going to be a journalist, I'd have stuck to a language up to degree level, but I thought I was going to be an international rugby player, dumped them all at 16! Damn and blast, what an advantage a second language would be... perhaps journo schools should offer refresher courses? Anyway... read and enjoy.

Ever read this?

Brian Schofield — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:48:43 +0000

It's the classic 1975 John lennon interview for Rolling Stone magazine. Not all of it makes sense unless you know your Beatles history well (I don't particularly) but it's still fantastic, and instructive. The golden days of rare but unfettered access to celebrities has long gone, now they're everywhere, saying nothing. The best thing about this piece, though, is that a reasonably pretentious writer gets to show off in the intro, then gets tied down to the Q&A format, and you get to hear Lennon's voice. Very odd that so few national papers in the UK do their arts and culture interviews this way - perhaps because the stars say nothing of substance, the writer has to waffle on about the leather sofas in the Groucho Club for the 875th time, rather than just print the words the artist spoke..... Anyway, enjoy.

The good, the bad...

Brian Schofield — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:25:01 +0000

A beautiful example of how newspapers nuture great writing, and then turn promptly great writers into bad ones, in today's Guardian.

Ed Jones, whom I've never heard of, produces a harrowing account of his life in a run-down estate in Salford, Manchester, demonstrating one of the trickiest truths about Modern Britain - you get the neighbours you pay for. His house in Salford cost around twice the national average annual income - a sane proportion, roughly what it was when my Dad bought his first house - but today that secured him a life of grime and crime.

And a few pages on, one of the most talented writers of her generation, Julie Burchill, has frittered out a rant about fellow jounalists she hates (specifically targetting, if not naming, Liz Jones, and obliquely attacking colleague Marina Hyde, which is a bit harsh), with, um, no research. She might have watched a film, once. As Ms Burchill loves to tell interviewers, "writing my column only takes half an hour a week... All right, make it an hour. " We all have to do our fair share of hack-work (please refer to the upcoming FHM Travel Handbook for yet another of my finest hours), but the shame is, it's the filla, not the fibre, that get's celebrated. Well, not here! The 100 visitors I've had so far are getting the good stuff!

Holy Cow!

Brian Schofield — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:09:27 +0000

Did you know there was a puddle of plastic the size of Britian in the centre of the Pacific? It's one of those facts you'd almost want NOT to know, because it's so affecting - my wife's response was to unilateraly declare a 'no presents' rule for next Christmas! An excellent job by Amanda Woods in the Sydney Morning Herald, painting a terrifying portrait of a place she's never seen. Gripping stuff.

Killer fact

Brian Schofield — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:13:37 +0000

In today's New York Times, the geographer Jared Diamond demostrates the power of a single killer fact. It's all about the number 32 - the number that, he contends, will define our time on earth... Required reading for global citizens, I'd say.

Book to consider

Brian Schofield — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:59:55 +0000

If you're vaguely aware of the rules of baseball (or, if you're a fan - basicall anyone except a total beginner on the sport) I've just finished and can heartily promote Summer of 49 by David Halberstam. As a lesson in the first rule of great non-fiction it's ideal - do a tonne of interviews. And then another tonne. And then another. The me-me-me masturbatory vibe of the modern blogosphere, combined with inherent shyness that we all have to overcome, can obscure that rule, but it's priceless. If you don't do the interviews, you'll end upwriting about yourself - a subject about which nobody cares.

Starting out

Brian Schofield — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:51:12 +0000

Essentially to check the software, we begin the blog in search of great non-fiction - I'm trying to do more with my author's website, creating a place where web-surfers know they'll find something to read... not, oddly, the easiest thing to do online. So, here's a link to what it's all about - committed reporting and excellent writing, as demonstrated in Tom Wolfe's masterful feature on neuroscience from 1996, Sorry but Your Soul Just Died.