Black Swans & Wild Fruits

Three books? Yes because I include last week’s Blood Red Road a Young Adult book that, despite its happy ending, began with gloom, doom and appalling foreboding — which put me off completely, if not the average young adult reader who enjoys bleak stories of the future.

Having struggled through the first 3-4 chapters of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, (now available at Nigel R Khan, Bookseller outlets nationwide) I am now in awe of New York Times readers who made this book on philosophy a best seller. Subtitled “The Impact of the Highly Improbable” the Black Swan of the title has nothing to do with ballet dancers (as I had hoped when I first glanced at the cover, thinking it to be the book of the recent movie that was nominated for an Oscar or two in 2011).

In fact the Black Swan of Taleb’s book is the actual bird. For centuries, so I learned from the beginning of this book, it was a given that all swans were white. The young, the cygnets might start out looking a bit grubby, brown and nondescript, but when they became adult they acquired the pure white plumage and graceful shape always associated with swans.

In the days before Australia was discovered and explored, if you wanted to describe something that was quite impossible, unthinkable, improbable, inconceivable, illogical, irrational you’d say it was like a black swan. However, there are black swans, in Australia and even in our zoo, if not now then some time ago.

Using the astonishing (at the time discovery) that in fact there are black swans as an example Taleb proceeds to show that the highly improbable are events ignored by experts yet they explain almost everything about our world.

This book has won glowing reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and from such respected, serious media as The Financial Times and The Times of London. As for me, I quite happily read the author’s tale of the Black Swan and the turkey who thought life was great, with all the food and drink he needed — until a few weeks before Thanksgiving …

However, faced with a sentence like this “Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding truths, investigating mechanisms that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters.” I tend to give up, reckoning life’s too short — at least at my age — to understand what the author’s driving at. Or maybe I’m just that bit dim. However, I intend to persevere by dipping in to this book here and there as the spirit moves in 2012, hoping for enlightenment …

I don’t know where the second book, Wild fruits, vegetables and other goodies of Trinidad and Tobago by Dr HA Skinner is on sale. While some of the fruits featured in this book grow in the wild here, others are domesticated, introduced species and some are exotics recently introduced by the author himself. From the standpoint of learning of the huge variety of fruits and vegetables, native, introduced and what might be described as “new immigrants” Dr Skinner’s book is informative, if not complete (I searched in vain for a herb, a small woody shrub with white inflorescence and small round leaves found in most backyards that can be a substitute for fine leaf thyme — that doesn’t earn a place in this book while the large, fleshy Spanish thyme does).

I was surprised to find Pitaya listed, because we had one growing outside our backdoor when we lived on the cold Sabana de Bogot? in Colombia. I can only describe the fruit as an outsized kiwi — and very good it was too.

However, there is much to interest the backyard gardener in this book although there are some weird gaps in the listing of fruits and veg. (wild or otherwise). I didn’t appreciate the author’s diatribe against modern methods of agriculture, found the poetry embarrassing and his polemics against profits and productivity boring. One knows he is an advocate for permaculture but having tried organic back gardening and harvested but 24 cherry tomatoes from three plants that sprawled all over a couple of garden beds made from steel drums, I know there is a place for the judicious use of fertilisers and pesticides — with the accent on biological controls for the latter.

Nevertheless, now that I’ve read this book, I’ll be on the lookout for a pitaya plant (any offers?) while you go in search of this publication in the bookstores of TT.