Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book sat on my (literal)
Author, Entrepreneur, Thinker.
How can anyone not write when living in such a vibrant, exciting and on-the-move place as Hong Kong? Since I arrived in 1987, China has gone from being a backwater to a superpower, and Hong Kong has gone from being a city of chancers and flimflam merchants to one of the world’s top three financial centres. And, dare I say, in the past few years, it’s been in the news for a lot of other reasons.
That’s not just one story, but very many stories, and those are the stories I tell. Not just of Hong Kong, but increasingly of the many other parts of the world I’ve been lucky enough to visit or live and work in. My stories and novels are not genre, but my take on the fun and the absurdity of life. They have a strong sense of place and I do my absolute best to get my facts right, but above all they’re about people.
You can find me on Amazon and Goodreads, and both replicate posts on this blog. I am a former chairman of the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle, I am sometimes asked to review books for the Hong Kong Review of Books, and Hong Kong Free Press used to publish some of my rants.
You can read about the entrepreneurial me on LinkedIn. And, when I’m not writing, I hike, sail and do other stuff that I sometimes post about on my blog. And, once every year or two, I send out a special email – thoughts, experiences of being a self-publisher, and short-stories, to those who sign up using the form at the bottom.
Fiction is fuel to our greatest faculty, the imagination. To imagine something is to create an image of it in our mind. Be it James Bond extracting himself from the clutches of SPECTRE, Raskoinikov committing the perfect murder or Frodo succumbing to the lure of the one ring, fiction enlivens our world with images that are of it, yet not of it. Because those images are so intense, they deepen and enliven our understanding of the world, take us to cultures, places and times we could never visit, and meet the people we’ve always most wanted or feared to meet. We suspend our belief only to gain deeper insight, we laugh only to have reason to cry, and we rejoice in the power of the word.
My father was a rock-climber and mountaineer, my mother a sailor: I got the bug early. For me, the natural world – not the “environment” – is a place of fear and promise, of escape and hope. I am constantly redefining my relationship with it, yet, looking out of my flat at the edge of the world’s most crowded square mile, I reflect on the huge portion of the world’s urban population who have no such relationship, whose lives are confined to four concrete walls and a smartphone.
If “applied philosophy” sounds like a term from the same lexicon as “military intelligence,” think again. “Philosophy” as a word carries a whole lot of baggage, but “critical thinking” is an activity which enables us to lead better-lived lives. When something is wrong, yet you can’t quite put your finger on why; when a speech offends you even when nothing offensive was said, when you’re asked to fill out a whole load of forms which request the same information time and again, that’s your faculty for critical thinking engaging. Mine engages a lot, and you can find out why on the blog.
Here are my books, and books to which I’ve contributed. The writers in the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle have amazing amounts of talent, and I’m proud and humbled to appear alongside them in the HKWC anthologies. And, then there is my novel – with more to follow, I hope.
Stanley Price is not a bad man, not a good man, but a man who can always find the wrong thing to do – and Hong Kong is the perfect city in which to do just that.
More detailsHKWC 2020: Short stories, not about HK but about what HK is like
More detailsHKWC 2019: Short stories of epiphanies
More detailsHKWC 2018: Short stories of high places and low days
More detailsHKWC 2017: Twenty four stories each in a different hour of the day
More detailsHKWC 2016: Twenty visions of the future of Hong Kong
More detailsUnder the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book sat on my (literal)
I cannot remember how I first found out about Yala Peak in Nepal’s Langtang National Park. At 5,500m, it was high enough to be challenging
Damp squib, not a smoking gun: how Hong Kong conspiracy theorists distorted a research project
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You know what to do…