Scottish books in brief

Published on Saturday 2 September 2006 00:18

SCOTLAND AND THE ABOLITION OF BLACK SLAVERY

BY IAIN WHYTE (Edinburgh, 18.99)

SCOTLAND was slow to wake up to the iniquities of slavery, though the great Enlightenment thinkers did have reservations. Hume saw slavery as a brake on general progress; for Adam Smith it was an encumbrance on the free market. This is no feelgood history but Whyte shows how, over time, the abolitionist consensus took hold and Scots took on a reforming role.

A GARDEN IN THE HILLS

BY KATHARINE STEWART (Mercat, 8.99)

"WORKING alone, one yet has a sense of companionship, as all life is busy at renewal, bees foraging, birds nesting, trees budding into leaf. There's also the knowledge that gardeners everywhere are at the same tasks, the same muscles aching, the same satisfaction in the smile at the end of the day." Smiles of satisfaction a-plenty are to be had in this account of the rhythms of the year in Stewart's Highland garden.

BAD MEDICINE

BY DAVID WOOTTON (OUP, 16.99),

MEDICINE has only recently shaken off the hold of the Hippocratic tradition, devoid though it was of anything we'd recognise as science. This much-vaunted continuity was a curse, says Wootton, a powerful brake on genuine development. This is an avowedly polemical study, and reactionary in reasserting the old-fashioned, pre-Foucauldian idea of "progress". But it's shockingly persuasive.

AUDIO BOOKS

BLOOD AND SAND WRITTEN AND READ BY FRANK GARDNER (Random House, 13.99, 3 CDs)

GARDNER plunges us straight into the event that nearly ended his life. He's the ideal narrator - modest, curious, honest. But it's not just his own saga, beginning when he was enthused by Islam as a teenager: it's an intimate history of terrorism in the Middle East.

BETTY TADMAN</em