Keggie Carew

Random selection - Tracey Thorn mentioned this biography in her book so I added the title to my wishlist and then accidentally downloaded a copy at full price (I normally wait until books drop under £2.00 because I'm cheap, what can I say?) Well worth the money, however!

My name is Tom Carew but I have forgotten yours.

When her father developed dementia and started to forget not only his family but also his amazing life, Keggie Carew set out to remember for him by researching his top secret show more career in the Jedburghs of the SOE. Tom Carew fought alongside the Resistance in France, earning a DSO and Croix de Guerre, and with the Patriotic Burmese Forces in Burma as part of Force 136 during World War Two.

I found both the wartime chapters fascinating, although I did begin to skim read some of the detailed research about Burma. but luckily this is also a very personal and poignant account about who her father was, to his three wives and his four children, and also the man who started slipping away memory by memory until his death in 2009. Keggie recalls with heartbreaking honesty how she and her sister had to find a care home for him - which he subsequently escaped from - when they could no longer cope with him at home. Thomas Arthur Carew was an inspiring and occasionally infuriating man with a larger than life personality, and the reader gets to know him through the eyes and heart of a daughter's tribute. Keggie is an artist and not a writer, but the intimacy and intensity of her words really got to me in places. show less

this is excellent; it maybe should be 5 stars instead of 4.5. it's a fantastic look at ecology and animals and ecosystems and how politics (and money) gets in the way of doing the right thing. and how that effects animals and, in turn, the planet. it's smart and not without snark, it's got well known studies and personal anecdotes. it's very well done and the narration is also fantastic.

"It does not follow that because animals do not have complex syntactical language, they cannot think, as show more is often assumed. Coco's cognizance of human syntax, or lack of it, is not the point here. It's the dysfunctional relationships inevitable when we pull wild creatures into our world and remove them from theirs. It rarely works out well and we should stop doing it."

"Weapons gave us strength from club to spear to bow to gun. Pulling a trigger distances us, as does butchery, cooking, shopping, and euphemism."

"We forget abundance at our peril. And theirs."

"Here's the point. Food and agribusiness is a five trillion dollar global industry and counting. And that's political. Which is why you could be taken to court if you locked up your dog, but Saucy Sausages, Inc can put ten million pigs in metal cages so they can't even turn around, let alone put their nose in a drift of oak leaves, snuff the breeze, or ever feel the sun on their back. That is the reality for farmed animals. Me, humanizing them? No, animalizing them. Mammalizing them. There is no such thing as a factory pig farmer. It's a factory. The owner is behind a desk looking at numbers, spreadsheets, calculating inputs and outputs. The stock person has a job to do and a family to feed. The migrant is desperate for work. The consumer likes sausages. Government will not protect pigs because they don't give donations to political parties.

The profit is in the volume. Volume. Don't let's kid ourselves we are talking anything more than cheap sausages to gratify our greedy guts. This is not about feeding the world, the defense dredged up every time there is a question about animal welfare. Forget that a third of our food is wasted (1.3 billion tons or 3 trillion meals a year); over a third of global arable land grows crops for livestock, driving deforestation; that 7 kilos of plant protein produces 1 kilo of beef; and that there are now more obese humans than starving ones who have never eaten a sausage. For a hundred calories fed to animals, we receive 17 to 30 calories in meat and dairy products, like feeding a hundred bucks into a slot machine and winning back twenty. Every time. And we are supposed to be the rational creature. What a staggering waste of cereals, land, water, energy, and medication. Not to mention the required agrochemicals and resulting pollution. This is what threatens food security and drives poverty. People living in poverty are used as pawns to defend rich men's profit or assuage the average person's guilt. What twentieth and twenty-first century agricultural scientists and factory farming tycoons have achieved is to turn the farm animal, once again, into Decartes machine, and somehow, not enough people have noticed. We are complicit. We keep buying. We keep looking the other way. There is no outcry, apart from the lunatic fringe. We hate talking about it. We loathe reading about it. So we don't."

"Things have not improved for industrial farmed animals. They have simply become more systematic, more hidden away behind locked gates, signed 'No Entry' or 'Biosecurity.' There are things going on that should not be okay by anyone's standards. Gestation crate, veal crate, enriched cage. Animal welfare is a game of words, of enriched terms, of get-outs and loose interpretations. Guess what they call slightly bigger crates where a sow can turn round? Freedom pens."

"The methods, designs, and deaths we administer and allow in factory farms are legitimized evil."

"Our weight accounts for 36% of the biomass of all mammals on this planet. The animals we eat take up 60%, which leaves the mammals of the wild world just 4%."

"The term 'endangered species' has lost its potency from overuse."

"...we lose species faster than ever before. What a thing to wipe out a species. And what an indictment for it not to be a crime." show less

So how many of you folks know the history of the Jedburghs? If you're a fan of WW II's clandestine history, you're likely familiar with them, but I, admittedly, had never read of them before, of their notable contribution to the successful Allied invasion of Normandy or their work in Burma against the Japanese or the opposition they encountered from some commanders in the "real" army or why they scared the Brits in Burma. Dadland by Keggie Carew is not a military history book by any means, show more but there's a lot of fascinating history in it. It's also the memoir of a daughter trying to reconstruct her father's life in the turmoil of a broken family and the fog of her dad's dementia. Despite the abundance of sober themes, humor also lurks within the narrative; the moment after you think "How depressing," you'll be chuckling or LOL-ing. Keggie's emotional journey through this book is an entrancing read and the ending chapters kept me up way past my bed time last night. If you read it, you'll find out about the "Jeds," too! show less

I started 'Dadland' shortly before the lockdown, then put it aside as I thought it would be depressing to read about a beloved father suffering from dementia. I picked it up again because leaving books part-read bugs me and was pleasantly surprised not to find it upsetting. Keggie Carew manages to sustain a tone that cheerfully celebrates her Dad's life, despite very difficult times, rather than mourning. Tom Carew certainly lived a fascinating life. Of particular interest are his exploits show more during the Second World War, when he was part of the Special Operations Executive. He parachuted into France shortly after the Normandy invasion to train and co-ordinate the maquis, with the aim of supporting the Allied armies from behind enemy lines. After France was liberated, he was parachuted into Burma to support resistance to the Japanese and remained there for years after the end of the war.

While his adventures in occupied France are thrilling, the chapters on Burma were even more interesting. I knew very little about WWII in Burma and was struck by the tensions created by colonialism. Carew supported Burmese independence, while the colonial authority-in-exile assumed they could pick up where the Japanese left off. Conflict between the SOE and other UK government bodies ended up requiring adjudication by the Supreme Allied Commander, Mountbatten. Keggie Carew explains the complex Burmese political situation clearly and juggles events in the 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s deftly in a single chapter. The juxtapositions of letters sent by her father in the 40s and notes he wrote to himself 60 years later are striking. I enjoyed the scrapbook-ish feeling of the narrative sprinkled with telegrams, photographs, and diary entries.

More uncomfortable to read are sections about Keggie's later family life, as her father struggled to find work and her mother's mental health deteriorated. She is very open about the flaws of both her parents. The book seeks to try and explain without excusing the times when their children suffered badly from their behaviour. While this is a considered and thoughtful book, it is also distinctly emotional. This makes for a compelling read and one that inspires reflection upon family history and old age more generally. While it isn't exclusively a biography of Tom Carew, that is by far its strongest thread. As long as you aren't currently consumed with worry about elderly relatives, I think 'Dadland' qualifies as a suitable lockdown read. As all my grandparents have sadly already passed away and my parents are only in their 60s, I have less to worry about on that front than many. show less