"I’ve been on an odd sort of journey with this book. First of all, I came to it as a bit of a convert. You see, I’ve been doing research at work into intercultural understanding and multiculturalism, and a lot of the theory around that starts from the premise that for students to become interculturally understanding they first need to learn empathy. This hardly seems controversial � I mean, we have all read To Kill a Mockingbird, and so walking a mile in my shoes seems to be pretty good advice. But then, in the middle of last year, I mentioned to the woman who sits beside me at work that I was starting to think empathy might not be the unbridled good that I’d always taken it to be. I was almost expecting to be told to not be so bloody-minded and contrary, but instead she suggested I read Megan Boler’s ‘The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism’s gaze�. There’s only one thing worse than being a smartarse academic who challenges the otherwise unchallengeable � and that is being late to the game. Damn! If there is any consolation to be found, it is in the fact that this book was published in 2016, and Boler’s article was printed in 1997 � so, I’m not the only one late here.

There were things that annoyed me about this book. I was really surprised that it spent quite so much time referencing pop-psy books and writers. I mean, people like Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell and Sam Harris. The author is a professor of psychology at Yale. I know this book is written for a popular audience, but that still seems deeply strange behaviour to me. You might not think so, but one of the first things they teach you when you are becoming an academic is to go for the source of ideas, rather than the popularisers. I have problems with both Harris and Pinker � so, amusingly enough, I experienced precisely the heightened sense of cynicism he was discussing throughout this book right from the off. I’m happy to admit that the problem is my own bias � but even given my bias, it still strikes me as strange that someone in his position wouldn't be using academic references and standards more, even while writing for a popular audience.

Okay, so what is the problem with apple pie and motherhood? Or rather empathy? Well, as he says here, one of the problems is that empathy provides something of a spotlight. You can’t show empathy to more than one person at a time. If empathy means walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, well, that’s a mile in only one person’s shoes you can walk at any given time. And since there are over 7 billion people in the world, well, that’s a lot of walking you are going to have to do. By the way, 7 billion miles is another 50% further again out into space as the journey from here to Pluto. And as Boler makes clear, the problem with empathy is that there are people’s shoes that are simply not going to fit you - I'm never going to really know what it feels like to be intersexual or transexual - and my best intentioned guesses are likely to be well off the mark. And there will be shoes you simply will never be able to bring yourself to put your foot inside. But does that then mean those people do not deserve your empathy or the potential benefits that come from your empathy? Does it mean they ought to be treated badly? Am I only required to feel sympathy for people I can ultimately ‘understand� and put myself in their place?

A case in point. My daughter spent a year in Japan and while she was there she went out with a Japanese boy for a while. One night he decided to give her a real treat. They went to an up market restaurant and he ordered Fugo for them � fugo is otherwise known as the fish that kills. Well, sort of � because actually most fugo is now farmed, rather than caught in the ocean, and so it never gets to eat the algae it would use to produce the poison that can kill you. You know, it is the same old story, when myth and fact conflict, print the myth. That wasn’t the part of the story that bothered my daughter, though � you know, the part about her new boyfriend trying to poison her. The problem was that the fish arrived at the table very much alive (at least to my daughter's eyes) � it had been filleted alive only moments before arriving at the table, and so the fillets were still moving on the plate - 'moving'? 'Quivering'? Anyway, she told her boyfriend that there was simply no way she could bring herself to put an ‘alive� piece of fish into her mouth. Her boyfriend looked at her dumbfounded - not least because this was probably costing him an arm and a leg, and kept saying to her � ‘but it’s so fresh � it’s so delicious�. This cultural difference was so great and so fascinating to her that she ended up writing her Honours thesis around it.

This is basically my criticism of this book. While there is lots of discussion about empathy, and the problems of empathy � and most of these I agree with (you know, nationalism neatly divides the world into those you can and can’t feel empathy for) I think one of the mechanisms that helps ensure empathy cannot develop that is underestimated in this book is disgust. You know, as Pinker himself says in one of his books, the reason for food taboos in cultures is to ensure that you don’t end up marrying someone from outside your ‘group� � and these food taboos are always taboos to do with meat. No religion bars the eating of carrots � but eating pork…or eating alive fish... And if you can’t share food with someone, it is very hard to develop any other form of relationship with them. This is part of the reason why Christianity, which from the very beginning sought to be a universal religion, rejected the food taboos of the commandments in the Old Testament. A companion is literally someone you eat with (from the Latin for ‘with bread�) � stopping people from eating together puts a significant obstacle in the way of them becoming friends.

But the other thing that annoyed me about this is something else I’ve been reading about lately � that the most effective way to overcome cultural differences (to develop empathy, to get people to understand each other despite their cultural differences) is to do what you can to get them to actively work together toward a common goal. A really good book on this is O’Connor’s The Nature of Prejudice.

Which then brings me to my final concern with this book � it’s the ‘we just need to be more rational� bias it displays. I’ve got nothing against reason, per se, but he ends this book by saying that reason is objective (basically the same for everyone no matter their background) and so it is our main hope. And, to be honest, as much as I would quite like that to be the case, it isn’t hard to see the number of times ‘reason� has been used to demonise entire populations. You know, one of this guy’s heroes, as I've already mentioned, is Sam Harris � and Sam's ‘all of Islam is evil� approach to world politics seems to me to be lacking both empathy and compassion (and 'reason' if it comes to that). It makes me a bit ill to think of how he has used his 'reason' to effectively justify god knows how many millions of deaths since 9/11.

Like I said at the beginning of this review � I don’t think empathy is enough, I might even agree that empathy is worse at achieving positive relations between cultures than it is generally made out to, but I also think that we know the answer to how to address this. We need to actively find ways to achieve transformation based on different cultures working together towards common ends as equals. This has been proven time and again to be the most effective way to end conflict and to encourage people to recognise their common humanity. If ‘reason� leads us to Sam Harris and his 'Islam is evil' rubbish � we have no hope at all.

"

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After all, there is only one noble thing upon this Earth, and that is art. Man is merely a fading stain on a wall.

Playful and immensely readable, this is Binet taking a mischievous side-swiping look at Renaissance Florence in 1557. Issues of history are at play here as we read through a cache of letters discovered by 'B' which tell a story that offers up a new perspective on this period that has been so well documented, explored and written about.

At the same time, this also sets up intertexts with the historical fiction genre where, it seems, everyone from Jane Austen to the Brontes, Giordano Bruno to John Milton have turned detective: here it's the turn of Giorgio Vasari (author of The Lives of the Artists) who is set on the trail of the murder of Jacopo Pontormo who, appropriately enough, was famous for his ambiguous perspectives. And if that isn't enough, Binet sprinkles in enticing side-stories: two nuns, formerly followers of Savonarola, whose antics are hilarious; the Les Liaisons Dangereuses-alike machinations of Catherine de Medici ('read this letter from Maria, which I am having copied for you. Isn't it sweet? Isn't it just delicious? Isn't it every bit as gothic as you could wish!') and her cousin Piero Strozzi involving the young Maria de Medici and her feared marriage to Hercule D'Este, Duke of Ferrara; and the call to action of a group of artisans and labourers looking for social justice via an uprising: 'a spectre haunts Italy - the spectre of the Ciompi Revolt!'

Written in epistolary mode, this is a fast read and a fun one, but I did at times feel that it doesn't fully exploit the potential of the letters of which it is comprised: most of the voices of the correspondents aren't differentiated so we do need the labels - the exceptions are Catherine de Medici, Maria de Medici and the bombastic Benvenuto Cellini who is a constant delight. What the letters do convey, however, is a sense of immediacy and the simultaneity of plots and developments as no correspondent has the full picture that we do as readers.

The sense of the politics of art is strong here: the patrons of the period, the struggles with the Pope, the nascent Protestant reform hovering around the edges. This itself gives a perspective on the touristy sense of the 'timelessness' of Florentine art, a narrative that is sometimes pushed and which points away from the way art and artists were a set of developing programmatic actors in a far more fraught and politicised arena.

This may be playful and mischievous but it also says something about the history of art and the contested rule of Florence in the mid-sixteenth century. "