Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

"Another is Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books. Ian Fleming: The Complete Man is an authorized biography and offsets some of the more negative accounts of his life as a train wreck which ended early (he died of heart disease at age 56). I’ve always enjoyed Fleming’s writing (which in addition to all the Bond books includes the children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ) and growing up, seeing the new James Bond movie was always a family event. Both my parents were Dutch and I suppose like others around the world we half-believed that James Bond/Ian Fleming was a typical mid-20th century Englishman. With this book, we find out a bit more what Fleming was actually like. Other biographies published recently include one about the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828). It’s called Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, a professor of musicology at Maynooth University. Schubert famously died aged just 31, but striking early in the book is how old that was compared to some of his siblings. This book is written so it’s accessible to non-musicians, but this is a serious work of scholarship. One genre that’s had a strong showing this quarter is science. The Globe: How the Earth Became Round by James Hannam looks at how human beings figured out the Earth was round, a nice read for those of us who are still impressed by that feat. Hannam points out the extent to which people misunderstand the history, including Barack Obama in a speech. As he writes, “The truth is that, after AD 800, we don’t know of anyone in western Europe with a modicum of literacy who didn’t think that the Earth is spherical.”"