Anna Sam worked for eight years in a Leclerc superstore in Rennes as a check-out operator (a job which she amusingly describes as “beepeuse” in her interview with the Daily Telegraph). With her degree in French literature, Anna Sam was never going to be content with sitting at the till year in year out, and when she cottoned on to the power of the Internet, she launched her blog, Les Tribulations d’une Cassiere, (see the Google Translate version here) which became an instant success.

Book deals and possible film offers followed with the result that Anna Sam is no longer a beepeuse, showing once again the power of the Internet to catapult people into prominence.

Enough of the background.  Checkout is a humorous but also rather humbling account of the experience of dealing with customers – people like you and me who have to shop and try to keep the experience as quick and efficient as possible, often ignoring the real people who work in our local stores.   Customers continue mobile phone conversations while packing their bags.  They sneeze over the operator.  They belittle the staff in front of their children (“if you don’t work hard at school you will end up in a job like this”).

Despite his subject matter, Gordon Burn was never prurient or out to shock, but wanted to get behind the person to the reasons for their actions and the meaning of what they did.  He came to his topics dispassionately but shone a torch into murky corners to show the complicit systems in media and politics that supported the lives of outcasts and celebrities alike.

Burn was not a run of the mill author.  His friend the artist Damien Hurst wrote in an article in the Guardian, “I really do think he was the greatest writer, the best writer of our generation on art. It was because he was a novelist that he was so good: he brought something else to the table. There is so much bullshit and art-speak in the art world, it drives me nuts. Gordon cut through all of that”.

His last book, Born Yesterday is about as good a tribute to Gordon Burn as you could get.  It is a strange book, for at first glance it does not appear to be fiction at all, more like a rolling news review of 2007.  Burn covers many of the major news events of the year, including the abduction of Madeleine McCann, terror attacks at Glasgow airport, Gordon Brown’s succession from Tony Blair, the catastrophic flooding that affected great areas of the country.  All these stories are interleaved throughout the book, but as you read them you realise that this is not journalism at all.

Richard Wilson puts forward a good case for scepticism, reminding his readers that humanity has a long history of “meekly engaging in depraved acts of inhumanity on the basis of ideas that turned out to be total gibberish”.

Much of his book focuses on the public relations industry, citing a number of case studies to show how opinion can be manipulated.  He devotes a whole chapter to the way tobacco companies in the 1950s manipulated news organisations to question the increasingly obvious link between smoking and lung cancer.  The strategy consisted of getting an influential academic on-side (geneticist Clarence Cook Little in this case), and using him to question every scrap of evidence which research scientists gathered supporting the need for anti-smoking legislation.

Little insisted that it was not enough to show that lung cancer victims were smokers, but that until the cause of the link could be demonstrated under laboratory conditions, the link was irrelevant.  Tests showing that mice contracted cancer when exposed to cigarette smoke were contested, but on the other hand, animal tests which were favourable to the tobacco industry were heavily publicised.  Wilson shows that genius of the PR campaign was capitalising on the media’s love of “debate”.

A story really takes off when two sides are seen in opposition, even when it is obvious that the alleged “controversy” is falsely based.  This can be observed every day on programmes like BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, when even the most blindingly obvious truth has to be contested by a protagonist with opposing views, with the result that equal weight is given to both nonsense and fact.  One million people walked the streets of London to protest about the US/GB invasion of Iraq but this had no effect on those who wanted for a variety of reasons to believe the fantastic reports about Iraq’s offensive capability.

Wilson warns of the dangers of pseudo-science, and its ability to influence government and other decision-makers.  Wilson traces this back to Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s favorite scientist who’s wrong-headed ideas about agronomy led to mass starvation throughout Russia. Even worse, Lysenko’s ideas were taken up by Chairman Mao and his followers whose Lysenko-inspired agrarian reforms led to the worst man-made famine in history, with the loss of 30 million lives.

The chapter on “groupthink” describes that way in which a closed group of people can adopts a false belief and then support itself in perpetuating it despite mounting evidence suggesting its falsity.  I found myself thinking again of the decision to invade Iraq taken by Tony Blair’s cabinet when I read Richard Wilson’s list of symptoms of groupthink:

1. Invulnerability – everything is going to work out right because we are a special group
2. Rationalisation – explaining away warnings that challenge the group’s assumptions
3. Unquestioning belief in the morality of the group and ignoring moral consequences of the group’s decisions
4. Sterotyping those who oppose the group’s view as weak, evil, impotent of stupid
5. Direct pressure being placed on any member who questions the group couched in terms of “disloyalty”
6. Self-censorship of ideas that stray from the consensus
7. The illusion of unanimity among group members with silence being viewed as agreement.

I have worked on many large I.T. projects and have seen these processes at work when projects have begun to fail and careers and reputations are at risk.  Project teams easily acquire the need to plough on despite all warning signals to the contrary until finally the project is abandoned far too late for anyone to be able to recover any benefits from it.

Wilson goes on to consider the HIV/AIDS denial movement, begun in America and then influencing the thinking of the South African government where “AIDS dissidents” have had a malign effect on public policy leading to the denial of effective treatment for many.  President Tabo Mbeki immersed himself in AIDS denial literature and invited American AIDS dissidents to join a presidential advisory panel on AIDS and HIV, one of whose aims was to inivestigate “whether there’s this thing called AIDS . . . whether HIV leads to AIDS, whether there’s something called HIV”.  By 2005, more than 5.5 million South Africans were infected with HIV and 1000 were dying each day from AIDS.

In his concluding chapter, Richard Wilson lists the common threads which run through false and illusory belief systems: fundamentalism, relativism, conspiracy theories, pseudo-scholarship, pseudo-news, wishful thinking, over-idealisation, demonisation of perceived enemies, groupthink.  While many of the ideas in this book are nothing new in themselves, Wilson has gathered them together, with many fascinating examples from recent history, to provide a very useful handbook for people who know that things they read in the paper or hear on the television are “not quite right” and need to be challenged.

I was pleased to find that Richard Wilson has a blog Don’t Get Fooled Again in which he reports on many of the topics covered in his book.

Keith Laidler begins his book by describing a typical day in the life of a “database citizen”, from arriving home by plane after a business trip to Germany, traveling across London using his Oystercard, driving home and stopping for petrol, and using his mobile to phone his wife (and inadvertently joking that “there was no Al Qaeda attack on the plane”, thus triggering an analysis of his call).  By this time its only midday, and when John finally gets to eat dinner with his wife in the evening, over 20 surveillance interventions have been recorded.

Government and the commercial world have today achieved the “tyrant’s dream” in which it is possible to listen into the telephone conversations of every citizen, read their email, track their movements, profile their lifestyle, preferences and political affiliation.  And as Laidler points out repeatedly through his book, the legal structures necessary to prevent abuse lag far behind the abilities of the new technologies.  I used to think that perhaps it doesn’t matter very much as no-one would be interested in me, but having read this book, I can see the power of data mining and aggregation, which enable a vast range of officials and private companies to gain access to my private life, and most importantly, to get it terribly wrong and then to inflict untold unjust penalties on my through their own mistakes and incompetencies.

Take for example, the proposed Citizen Identity Card (so ably campaigned against by the NO2ID organisation).  Apart from the vast intrusion into private life brought by the card, its loss or malfunction will effectively lead to huge fines and will exclude citizens from a vast range of services and possibly lead to false arrest and imprisonment.  Taken in the context of repeated government IT failures, the advent of an ID card should fill anyone with a profound air of foreboding about the cock-ups which will have the potential to disrupt the lives of huge sectors of the population – imagine trying to fly home from holiday and pass through the airport with a faulty ID card.

Laidler devotes a chapter to RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, which can be inserted into almost anything from clothing to car tyres to track the movement of products during their lifetime.  Although the transmission distance of these chips is not large, Laidler points out that the plan is to harvest data from them at entry and exit points in shops, stations, airports etc.  Marks and Spencer for example are already using these chips for stock control (although only in the paper label attached to the garments), but it is not difficult to see how if the chip was implanted in the garment itself, a store could look at your past purchasing decisions every time you pass through their entrance.  The potential of the RFID chip for unwarranted surveillance is so vast that a coalition of 40 civil liberties groups is calling for a moratorium on their deployment until a formal technology impact assessment has been made.  The prospect of unique ID tags for all objects world wide-and the massive data aggregation made possible is too threatening for it to be rolled-out without challenge from consumer and citizen interests.

The book goes on to discuss the dangers of biometrics – and also points out how the British government has gone far beyond European requirement in calling for biometrics on the new passport system.  The danger with biometrics and also DNA identification is the huge problems resulting when things go wrong.  If your password or PIN is compromised you can get a new one relatively easily, but if your DNA or biometric record is compromised it will be very difficult to do anything about it, or to convince the authorities that you are being falsely identified and possibly accused of unspeakable crimes.  Laidler records an instance of a motorist being held in prison for 43 days because of a malfunction in the fingerprinting technology used in Oregon which resulted in him being identified as a wanted man.  He eventually was cleared and compensated, but how often will this happen without a satisfactory outcome.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this book is the realisation of how far surveillance has gone and how little political will there is to do anything about it.  The “current threats” (whatever they are) and the feeling that “innocent people have no need to fear”, seems to provide sufficient justification for governments and companies to do what they want.  Laidler ends his book by urging his readers to be vigilant and also to blow the whistle whenever they can.  One is left feeling that we are using a butterfly to stop a juggernaut and my own response on finishing the book was to be far more aware of what is going on and to think about joining Liberty UK.

Abley points out that English is immensely adaptable.  It continually absorbs new words, transmutes the meaning of existing words and moreover, other countries use it to fill the gaps in their own languages.  The Finnish do not have a word for “please” but now use ours, and have dropped their own word (anteeksi) in favour of “sorry”.  Slovakian teenager boys address their girl-friends as beib (babe) or hany (honey).  The Austrian magazine “News” headlines “Das Grosse Interview” and Austrian cellphones offer “Downloaden”.  Numerous similar examples are quoted and it is difficult to see how any language purist of another tongue can suggest any way in which this “Englishisation” can be stopped.  We are going to find English all over the world, particularly in the worlds of business, entertainment or technology.

Esperanto now seems a very archaic experiment, although still with devotees throughout the world.  In its place we find new forms of English, sometimes systematised, sometimes completely informal.  As an example of the systematised “Englishes” Abley tells us about Globish, an invention of Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere which has a vocabulary limited to 1,500 words, and uses short sentences and extensive hand gestures to get the point across.  Other attempts to create a standard world-wide language include Basic English, and Basic Global English, all trying to make life easier by reducing vocabulary and standardising grammar.

But these systems seem weak compared to the viral transmission of English from music and cinema, the Internet, text messaging and all other forms of communication.  Every language group seems to have absorbed a type of English from these media and Abley shows us the startling linguistic effects as many hybrid languages evolve.  Abley devotes a whole chapter to Black American English, which he likes to call  hip-hop, or rap.  He shows that this is a remarkably complex language with its own extensive vocabulary and rules.  Hip-hop has itself exported to many other countries and has infiltrated standard English (if there is such a thing) to a surprising degree.  At a G8 Summit meeting, George Bush famously called out “Yo Blair” to the British Prime Minister.  Tony Blair “obediently trotted over” as Abley puts it – one of the more humiliating experiences in our ex-PM’s career!

The chapter on Cyberspace and the Internet is fascinating, and only goes to show the great speed at which language evolves and changes – and how a website such as Facebook can introduce new words into the language which then go on to be used in other contexts.

The book is readable, with each chapter covering different topics or locations, and it is filled with anecdote and stories, almost like a travel book; which is not surprising as The Prodigal Tongue is almost as much a travel book as a text on linguistics.  I read it while on holiday and it was ideal to pick up and put down for short periods, being not particularly challenging, but definitely interesting.

Seierstad first visited Checyna during the war in 1994, when the break-up of the Russian empire was in full swing. Boris Yeltsin, while encouraging other Soviet nations to “take as much sovereignty as you can”, drew the line at allowing Chechnya to gain its independence because he felt that this would threaten the borders of Russia itself.  The result was a violent war, with Chechen fighters confronting young Russian soldiers with the traditional daggers and assassins’ bullets, only provoking severe retaliation from the Russians against the civilian population.

Seierstad begins her book by describing her first visit to the country as a young reporter for a Swedish newspaper, managing to infiltrate herself deep into Chechen-held territory, where she met Chechen fighters and village elders, even staying in the home of a senior Chechen leader.

Eventually peace negotiations with Russia took place and Chechya gained a semi-independence from Russia.  However, when Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 another war started, even more brutal than the first, killing tens of thousands of Chechens and leading to ultimate Russian victory, greatly enhancing Putin’s reputation among his own people, leading to his appointment as president in 2000.  The Chechen leaders were killed over the next few years during a “normalisation process”, resulting in a Chechen republic fully integrated with Russia, with every official  photograph of the Chechen President Ramzan being accompanied by another one of Putin.

Seierstad’s book is largely about her recent return to Chechnya, during which she travelled extensively and interviewed many people both citizens and officials.  Much of her book describes the plight of the many orphaned children of Chechnya.  She stayed for several weeks with Hadijat, the “Angel of Grozny” of the books title, who began to take in and look after street children, and runs a non-official orphanage based in her home and the homes of some of her supporters.  The children’s tales are harrowing, and there is no certain future for them, for the instability of life in the republic results in a daily struggle for survival.   Such is the damage done to the children through war and poverty, abuse and neglect that it seems impossible at times to see any future for them.  Hadijat somehow managed to create a family experience for them however, and her influence on the children is considerable.

Seierstad manages to gain an extensive interview with President Ramzan himself.  Ramzan is adulated by most of his people  but this seems to be the adulation due to a tribal chief rather than the leader of a democracy.  He seems to be a man both humble and autocratic at the same time, and evidently immensely dangerous to his enemies.  He is a committed Muslim and this leads to statements about the need to “protect” women by keeping them modestly dressed and focusing on their domestic duties, while he himself has no compunction about being seen with glamorous models.

The tension between Whabbist Islam (as preached by followers of Osama Bin Laden) and the mainstream Islam approved by the state is visible throughout the book.  The mainstream Islam is seen as a means of social control and order, whereas Whabbist Islam is outlawed and its followers seen as enemies of the state.

This book is probably about as good as it gets if you want a picture of Chechyna today.  There is much of interest, not least the way in which a Muslim republic can form part of modern Russia.  The countless personal stories give it a much human interest, but there is also plenty of background to the history and politics of Chechnya, such that having read this you feel you know as much as you need to know about this sorry nation, whose troubles are probably far from over.