Month: July 2022

Figuring: The Joy of Numbers – Shakuntala Devi

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

As a child I was fascinated by mathematics, but especially by tricks and shortcuts that could be done. I started reading Martin Gardner’s section of Scientific American when I was eleven or twelve years old, I don’t claim to have understood all of it but each month my knowledge of recreational mathematics was stretched just that little bit more. I’ll cover one or more of his books in a later blog. However in 1977, when I was fifteen, this book was published and it was written by somebody who, at least partly, earned her living from amazing feats of mental arithmetic, I had to get a copy, and this book is still on my shelves today. Some of it I already knew but there were whole sections where she explained how to do tricks that I had seen done but which had baffled me such as calculating the day of the week for any date given to you or working out square and cube roots in your head. I remember practising these tricks for hours until I could do them too.

The book starts of simply by looking at each of the digits 0 to 9 in detail, explaining what is special about each of them and giving tips around multiplying and dividing by them, patterns in their multiplication tables etc. She then moves on to chapters about multiplication, addition, division and a very short chapter on subtraction. These chapters not only suggest shortcuts, which I still use today, to perform such calculations but ways to quickly check if the answer you get makes sense such as casting out nines. The book really caught my attention however when we reach calculating squares, cubes, square roots and cube roots. Amazingly cube roots which non mathematicians would assume to be much more difficult then square roots are actually very simple and fifth roots are even easier, square roots proved to be quite tricky. But just to see how easy extracting a cube root lets look at all you need to know, worryingly forty five years later I can still remember this:

  • 1 cubed = 1
  • 2 cubed = 8
  • 3 cubed = 27
  • 4 cubed = 64
  • 5 cubed = 125
  • 6 cubed = 216
  • 7 cubed = 343
  • 8 cubed = 512
  • 9 cubed = 729

Assuming that we are starting with 474,552 (which is 78 x 78 x 78) how do you get the right answer? Well first of all look at the thousands i.e. 474, this comes between 343 and 516 so the first digit is the cube root of the lower number which is 7. Next you will notice that all the cubes in the list above end with a different number and you just need to find the one that ends with the same digit as the number you are trying to extract the root of which in this case is 2 which matches 512 or 8 cubed and there we have the answer, the 7 from the thousands value along with the 8 from the final digit gives the required answer of 78. Notice that it was simply a case of knowing the first nine cubes and no actual calculation was performed on 474,552 in order to get the right answer.

Calculating the day of the week is a bit more tricky as you need to memorise four tables, admittedly the first of which is simply the first four values from the seven times table so this barely counts as a table and the working out is also more involved. I can’t do this in my head anymore and frankly with the all pervading computers or mobile phones with calendars on them what was once a occasionally handy ability is now of no use whatsoever as you are rarely that far from a device where you can look up the day for a specific date if you need it. When I was a teenager however this was quite impressive at least amongst the other maths fans at school and I got to be pretty quick at it.

The book finishes with chapters on special numbers and finally tricks and puzzles most of which, even then, I had already encountered but this book stretched still further my mathematical skills and I loved it. It has been great fun reading it again and finding out what I remembered and what I had forgotten. Shakuntala Devi died at the age of 83 in 2013 and wrote several books on mathematics along with astrology and oddly ‘The World of Homosexuals’ which she claimed was inspired by her marriage to a homosexual man but Figuring: The Joy of Numbers is probably her best known work, at least outside India although sadly it appears to now be out of print. If you know a child interested in mathematics I suggest trying to get a copy for them, it really is a joy.

Lonely Planet Unpacked – Various

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

This collection of twenty six stories of travel disasters by some of the Lonely Planet guidebook writers can be read as a series of useful precautionary tales or just as a very entertaining book where you keep thinking I’m glad I’ve never been there. It was published in 1999 as part of the regrettably short lived Lonely Planet Journeys series and was obviously popular as the follow up volume, imaginatively entitled, Lonely planet Unpacked Again came out in 2001 this time with thirty one travel disaster stories some of which are by the authors also featured in this volume, clearly people to avoid travelling with. The obvious exception to this list of people to avoid is Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, and a man who has been everywhere so can definitely be excused the odd travel problem and in this book is merely faced by an extremely drunk Tibetan trying to get into the vehicle Tony was in by repeatedly headbutting the windscreen.

Some of the problems faced by the writers are relatively easily solved, such as with Bruce Cameron who uses a wheelchair so is rightly worried each time he arrives at a new location that he can access the bedroom and bathroom and in Tuscany this involves a very helpful landlord at the rented villa removing not only doors but the in one case the door frame and even part of a wall so that this could be achieved. Others are more concerning with Pat Yale travelling alone in Kenya who on her first day in Nairobi fell in a dark hotel corridor and broke her wrist so ending up with four weeks in plaster and heavily restricted as to what she could do. Precautionary tales include John Mock (another writer in both volumes) talking about the dangers of travelling in Pakistan and specifically the Karakoram Highway which takes you to Gilgit in the Hindukush and some amazing trekking routes. Unfortunately the KKH, as it is known, is one of the most dangerous roads in the world with regular rockfalls, an extremely narrow roadway with precipitous drops into the Indus river far below and armed locals who see closing the road as a way of getting what they want. The only alternative, at least when Mock is writing was Pakistan International Airways with their fleet of antique and barely functioning planes, he documents several trips between Gilgit and Islamabad, none of which I would be looking to be on. Amazing he never saw anyone actually crash off that road but Jennifer Brewer managed to go off the edge of a road in of all places Åland, an extremely flat island in the Baltic Sea belonging to Finland, possibly in the only part of the island such a feat could be achieved and with only 8km on her hire car tachometer.

The book bounces all over the world from China to India, various African countries but surprisingly only Brazil is representing South and Central America, a part of the world where I’ve had a couple of dodgy experiences and which I was expecting to be featured more. Sometimes the disaster is self inflicted, more often it’s encounters with other people or animals where the problems arise and for Randall Peffer who describes riding out a hurricane in Puerto Rico it just feels like the world is out to get you. The book is an easy read, I would pick it up go through a couple of the short stories and then put it back down again oh so glad that in my various out of the way journeys I’ve never had to put up with whatever I’ve just read about. Like all the Lonely Planet Journey’s books it is out of print but it, and it’s follow up, are readily available on the secondary market.

The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh – Shirley Harrison

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

This week my book choice is a most unusual biography, because although the subject is internationally famous a lot of people don’t know that there is a real Winnie-the-Pooh who was actually owned by Christopher Robin. He has led a very interesting ‘life’ culminating in his retirement along with some of his friends in the Children’s Library in New York and the story is very well told in this entertaining volume. I have to say that I knew some of this story but there was still a lot of material that was new to me. I’ve been a teddy bear collector for over twenty years and a book collector most of my life, now combining both of these interests by occasionally purchasing books signed by A A Milne, E H Shepard, Christopher Robin Milne and even H Fraser-Simson (of which more later).

The bear on the cover is the real Winnie-the-Pooh originally made by probably the finest teddy bear maker in the UK, Farnell, and purchased from Harrods for Christopher Robin’s first birthday in 1921. Over the years he was joined by a cuddly pig named Poglet and later the smaller and easier to carry version named Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga and Roo all arrived too in fairly quick succession. Rabbit and Owl who also appear in the books were additions by A A Milne, they were never actual toys owned by Christopher Robin. Those people who have visited Pooh in his retirement home are often surprised that not only doesn’t he look like the Disney version but he also is very different to the one drawn by E H Shepard. In fact the model for the bear in the books is Shepard’s daughters teddy which was probably a Steiff.

New York Children’s Library has Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and Kanga, sadly Roo was lost at the family home of Cotchford Farm well before the toys made their crossing to America in 1947, originally for a short visit which turned into a permanent stay. They were originally held at the offices of Milne’s USA publishers E P Dutton but transferred to the library in 1987. During their time at Dutton they travelled all over America and Pooh even came back to England for three brief visits, including once flying on Concorde when Pooh was invited onto the flight deck to meet the Captain, he really was an international celebrity.

The rear of the book has some of the lovely photos selected to illustrate the story, several of which I hadn’t seen before including top left Christopher Robin starting school alongside his childhood friend Anne and below that an eight or nine year old Christopher Robin with some of the toys, Pooh and Eeyore are on the floor with Tigger under his left arm and Poglet in his right. Piglet is only three inches (7½cm) tall so this is definitely Poglet. In the middle is the original Winnie Bear with his owner Lieutenant Colebourn before he was donated to London Zoo early in WWI, which is where Christopher Robin met him and the then four year old Edward Bear was renamed Winnie in his honour. To the right of that image is the bridge in Ashdown forest where the game Pooh-sticks was played and named. At the bottom of the page is Christopher Robin’s first school bag from when he went to boarding school at the age of nine and marks the end of his time with Pooh as his constant companion. The fact that his father had used his real name in the books led to Christopher Robin being bullied at school and he built up a resentment to the books that he held for a large part of his adult life, only becoming reconciled with the characters and his and their ever growing fame much later on.

The book not only follows Winnie-the-Pooh on his journeys but also summarises the lives of the Milne family including the somewhat surprising decision by the naturally reclusive Christopher Robin to open The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, although he did keep a fairly low profile about his links to the toy animals of his childhood and the books they led to. I do have a complete set of the paperbacks signed by him though which presumably originally came from his bookshop.

Above is Winnie-the-Pooh as drawn by E H Shepard for comparison with the actual cuddly teddy bear show on the front cover.

Winnie-the-Pooh continues to have massive fame around the world, considerably helped by the Disney version which with films and merchandising generates billions of pounds every year, A A Milne in his will left money to his family but also to set up The Milne Trust which uses his royalties from the characters for charitable causes and Disney, to be fair, also donates significant sums to charities. The book ends with a summary of the main beneficiaries. As for H Fraser-Simson, he was a composer who lived near the Milne’s London home and it was he that set several of the poems from ‘When We Were Very Young’ and ‘Now We Are Six’ to music with the tunes that I learnt as a child. At 102 years old Winnie-the-Pooh has now outlived all his compatriots and looks to just becoming more famous as the years go on and this tribute to a much loved bear was a really good read.

The Greek Coffin Mystery – Ellery Queen

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

As a lover of mystery and crime novels it is perhaps surprising that this was my first time reading Ellery Queen and the fact that I have started at the fourth book is due entirely to this being the only Ellery Queen that I possess. Let’s get the somewhat complicated back story of the authorship out of the way first and then dive into this surprisingly long (363 pages) crime novel. Ellery Queen is given as the author as well as the name of the private detective featuring in the book, in fact it is the work of two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who also individually wrote crime novels under those names. To add to the confusion both those names are also pseudonyms; Frederic Dannay’s real name was Daniel Nathan whilst his cousin Manfred Bennington Lee was really Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky. Between them they wrote over thirty Ellery Queen novels and collections of short stories and there were also a few later books which were ghostwritten by various other authors and supervised by Lee.

What to make of this book though? It features Detective Inspector Richard Queen and his private detective son Ellery, who improbably gets to sit in on all meetings and interviews, along with visiting crime scenes just as if he was an actual member of the police force, he can even apparently make arrests. Indeed it took me some time to realise that Ellery Queen was, unlike his father, not actually an official part of the police. The story initially is simply the case of a missing will following the death of an elderly art dealer in New York. When it is worked out that the only place the will could have been put in the short time available from when it was last seen to when it was discovered to be missing is in Georg Khalkis’s coffin before the lid was screwed down an exhumation is ordered. The coffin being opened however is found to have two bodies in it, Khalkis and a mystery corpse and the case becomes murder and the problem is not just who killed the unknown victim but who are they… With thirty nine characters (including the police and Ellery) it can get complicated and I was glad of the list of people at the front of the book when trying to sort out the different relationships between them all.

The story is split up into two books, the first ending with the arrest of yet another incorrect suspect but with the police apparently satisfied that this time they have got their man. The second book details the collapse of the case against the arrested person and the slow discovery of the clues leading to the true murderer and thief. One thing I really liked was at the end of the thirtieth chapter where there is a break in the story for Ellery Queen to speak directly to the reader and make clear that at this point you have read all the clues needed to solve the case and that there is only one solution that fits everything you know. With almost sixty pages still to go it provided a break where I could go back in my mind over what has happened in the first three hundred pages and try to solve it. I have to admit that the actual solution was so surprising that I didn’t get it but yes everything fitted once you knew who did it.

This edition of The Greek Coffin Mystery was published as part of the Penguin Drop Caps series of twenty six books each with an author starting with a different letter and it is particularly appropriate for this to be Ellery Queen book chosen for Q as the chapters in this one are titled as an acrostic spelling out the titles and author. First published in 1932, the first Penguin Books edition came out in May 1957, this hardback was published in 2013 for the American and Canadian market only.

As I said at the start this was my first Ellery Queen mystery and whilst I enjoyed it I did find the character of Ellery Queen rather annoying. Reading about later books in the series he apparently does calm down a lot as the series progresses with far fewer irritating build ups to an incorrect accusation than occurs in this story. Maybe I ought to read one of the later books to see if I like him better.