Short cuts

From US journalist Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021 aged 86, comes a posthumous kind of memoir, STILL PICTURES (Text Publishing). Through its short reflections on personal photos, it’s a characteristically Malcolmian work, reflecting on and resisting the conventions of the form in which she writes, said the Wall St Journal. It’s a testament, thought the New Republic, “to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft and control”. Its subject remains elusive, but there are fascinating moments: finding out she is Jewish, her family’s bribe to get out of Nazi Germany may have included buying an SS officer a racehorse, and speech coach Sam Chwat, who helped her present in a defamation trial.

If you’ve ever looked into which fields of human endeavour might contain the most terms in English, you’ll have taken a close squint at horticulture. The words for leaf shapes alone are likely to boggle your mind. Two plant experts with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have compiled 250 “curious words for plant lovers” in PLANT WORDS (Welbeck). There’s a welter of terms related to growing, plant types, people and history, and botanical science. Even the most greenfingered and -brained will expand their knowledge.

If you’ve ever wanted to better understand the makeup of everyday materials, from metals to plastics to crystals, Neil Broom’s THE SECRET LIFE OF NUMBER 8 (Mary Egan) might be the book for you. The retired engineering professor uses an icon of our rural landscape, the 4mmthick wire that has restrained millions of sheep and cattle, as an entry point into a lifetime’s knowledge of materials science using approachable language and easily understandable illustrations. ▮