I've been reading 'This Is Birmingham - a glimpse of the city's secret treasures'.
It's a large, lavishly illustrated 64-page paperback, mainly aimed at the city's children but still an interesting browse for oldies with a sense of place and history.
It's been drawn/written by Birmingham artist Jan Bowman, complete with her own blank verse praising the city's diversity and outlining its history.
It would be a charming hymnal for young Brummies, were only the verse sing-able.
The message is one that the city council would surely sing amen to. If you live in Birmingham, says Jan, open your eyes to to its history, its culture, its benefits and its future.
To be honest, at times This Is Birmingham feels a bit too 'right-on' for my crusty old tastes. It's very heavy with 'people politics' and multiculturalism.
(Even the history pages found a way of including this. For example, successive pages included pictures of trains of slaves in neck chains, something which I doubt was ever seen in Birmingham itself and which felt a bit tedious, as if the melting-pot was calling the kettle hideously white.)
So the message it delivers is a bit saccharine. In Birmingham today, every ethnic group has won and all must have prizes. Yet I suppose that's the story of children's books through the ages.
If there's one central pillar of the history side to the book, it's Jan's tribute to The Lunar Society.
She credits this group of 18th Century Enlightenment men - more than anyone - for making Birmingham what it was to become: 'The Workshop of the World'.
Maybe the 'Lunaticks' get too much credit. At times it makes me wonder if they were responsible for the abolition of slavery, the spread of democracy through the Western world and just generally the saving of humanity.
From a boater's point of view I'm glad she doesn't forget the city's canals, and I counted eight narrowboats and canal scenes, including the first drawing I've ever seen of the view from underneath Spaghetti Junction (below). The foldout map at the front of the book also shows all the canals in the area and NO roads.
However, she forgets to honour the canals for their crucial role in creating the industry that made Birmingham so successful in the first place. In the book they are credited just as a leisure resource, with no working narrowboats or original canal scenes pictured.
Overall, though, this is really a lovely little book, a superb contribution to local literature. It will be especially helpful in giving ethnic minorities a greater understanding of their city and encouraging them to explore the waterways more.
I do hope it gets stocked in local chandlery and boatyard shops. The cover price is £9.99, but buy it on Amazon for £6.99 (that link will give me a smidgen of commission for making the effort of writing this review, thanks!).
Jan Bowman's work on this is not over, though; not as far as I'm concerned. I want to see a supplementary edition focusing solely on the city's waterways.
For only by way of the many lock flights of the Birmingham Canal Navigations - climbing up from Warwick or Worcester, Walsall or Wolverhampton, Stourbridge or Stratford or Fazeley - do you get to realise how Birmingham is truly a city on a hill. Make of that metaphor what you will.
Does anyone else want to get my copy and do a blog review of it?
(For a better, broader, less canal-focused review of 'This Is Birmingham' see Rob Lyons' review in Spiked. He doesn't give as many smartarse puns or pretentious metaphors as me.)
Is the book still going begging? I would like to take a look but was particularly interested in "Spiked" - had never come across it before.
Andy
Posted by: andy tidy | Tuesday, 02 March 2010 at 08:19 PM
No smartarse puns or pretentious metaphors in Rob Lyons' review? Not worth reading then. I'll stick to yours Andrew.
Posted by: Fiona | Tuesday, 02 March 2010 at 04:58 PM