Covid-19 modeller and physics professor Shaun Hendy has been one of the key science communicators during the Covid response in Aotearoa.
He joins Afternoons not to talk Covid-19, but instead to share his favourite books, music, and TV as its latest Bookmarks guest.
Shaun Hendy Photo: supplied
He tells Jesse Mulligan he’s had a pretty intense few weeks.
“Last week was pretty bad, I had to keep myself on Zoom for seven hours a day. This week is not so bad, a little bit quieter – partly because the university teaching term is finished, so that’s always a bit of relief.”
His first music choice was Straitjacket Fits, “one of my favourite Kiwi bands.”
The song he chose, 'Hey Down in Splendour', was his favourite off the album he first purchased while living in Australia.
“I was studying over in Australia for a while and I was really chuffed to see a Kiwi band in an Australian record store, so I brought the album and listened the heck out of this.
He first saw the band live during orientation week when he was studying at Massey in Palmerston North.
Hendy’s first book choice was Fukushima by Mark Willacy.
“This is a book that’s had a big influence on me from a career perspective. People will remember the earthquake that led to a tsunami hitting the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It was one of my first experiences as a science communicator reacting to a breaking news story.
“I’m not a nuclear scientist so it came a bit out of the blue for me. New Zealand’s nuclear scientists don’t seek the limelight, they tend to hide away. When the disaster happened, the media went looking for local experts and, by and large, couldn’t find them.”
Hendy says he found the book in a bookstore and thought it would be interesting to read the story by someone who was on the ground in Fukushima. Willacy is an Australian journalist who was in Japan at the time
The book shows that Japanese scientists and the government knew there was a one in four chance that the power plant could be hit by a tsunami in it’s lifetime, but chose not to reveal their concerns for fear it undermine confidence in nuclear power.
“It just brings home the importance of scientists making their knowledge public and it’s one of the lessons I’ve taken into the Covid-19 crisis where we try and make sure all our work is available to the public as well as sending it to the politicians.
“That really comes from reading this book and trying to take those lessons on board.”
His second book pick was The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. He was recommended the book by someone on Twitter who was listing good lockdown reads.
“It really was the perfect stress relief during lockdown. There was a lot of sleepless nights and with us doing all the modelling and the media, you end up with quite a lot of adrenaline racing around in the evening, so this was perfect.”
The book is science-fiction about a security robot that accidentally becomes self-aware and is painfully shy, it spends a lot of its time trying to avoid human contact as well as trying to do its job.”
His final book choice is Roma Sub Rosa, a historical fiction series by Steven Saylor on ancient Rome.
“Left to myself, I gravitate towards historical fiction, it’s my favourite genre. I’m interested in history and historical fiction is a good way to get into history and make it feel real.
“[Roma Sub Rosa] is a set during Caesar’s time, it’s got all these famous classical characters going about their plots and machinations and the lead character is essentially a private detective and gets hired to occasionally get directly involved in well-known political intrigues of the time.”
Back to music, Hendy’s second song choice was 'Tank Park Salute' by Billy Bragg.
“He’s one of the first alternative musicians I got into.”
Hendy says he first heard when he was at a friend’s house and they had borrowed the cassette from their older brother.
“I had one listen to this album, then I’m off on holiday to the beach with my own family and this album just did not go away from my head. I came back and got very much into Billy Bragg and he’s still one of my favourite artists.”
For the first time in Bookmarks history, Law and Order has been picked as a TV show. Hendy says he got a bit hooked on the show while suffering jet lag in the US.
“There was about five or six years where I was part of a collaboration in the United States and I was having to go over to the US two or three times a year. It’s just the worst for jet lag, it’s worse than going to Europe, you just don’t want to go to bed, you want to stay up all night and, just when your body is ready for sleep, you’ve gotta go in and start work.
“You end up in your hotel wide awake in the middle of the night and there’s always a channel playing Law and Order so it became my jet lag watch.”
His other TV pick was Who do you think you are? A BBC show on genealogy.
“I just started watching this and it’s fascinating. In some ways we are the sum of our ancestry and we’ll often make assumptions about ourselves and where we came from and often families will not tell the complete truth.
Hendy is also a fan of Ken Burns documentaries The Vietnam War and The Civil War which he watched during train journeys between Auckland and Wellington.
“I had a year where I decided to give up flying so I was taking the train back and forth pretty regularly and I would pull these documentaries down on my iPad. I’d try and do a bit of work on the train, but it is hard to work solidly for a whole day, so when I needed a break I’d watch another hour of these Ken Burns documentaries.
His final music choice was 'Groceries' by Mallrat which he describes as a “real ear-worm.”
“She’s kind of like the Australian Benee, similar age and genre. Again, it’s sort of a lockdown pick. The title is Groceries and, when you’re in lockdown, the highlight of your week is perhaps going to the supermarket.”
