The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
02 May 2013 02:27:08
Lauren Beukes's previous novel, the Arthur C Clarke award-winning Zoo City, was an urban fantasy with shades of detective fiction: a grittier version of His Dark Materials recast in South Africa. In her new book, a man named Harper Curtis living in depression-era Chicago comes upon a house – or House, as it is capitalised in the novel – that is a portal to other times. Inside there's a dead man on the floor, and on the walls a constellation of unrelated artefacts, among them a pair of butterfly ... Read Full Story
The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
30 Apr 2013 02:31:27
When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google's CEO to become the company's executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson's famous gibe about postwar Britain – which had "lost an empire but not yet found a role". What, one wondered, would Dr Schmidt's new role be, and when would he find it? Well, now we know. As well as acting as the public face of Google, he's also been travelling the globe, talking to people and researching a book with his co-author... Read Full Story
The XX Factor by Alison Wolf
30 Apr 2013 02:29:22
The XX Factor has the subtitle "How working women are creating a new society", which sounds cheerful, but the book mainly suggests that though some women have become far more equal to men, women are becoming much less equal to one another. Time was when all women, rich or poor, were seen as predominantly homemakers whatever else they did; but now in advanced countries stacks of women are as well educated as men, and enjoy important careers as well as raising children. Such parents strain to get ... Read Full Story
Small Wars, Far Away Places by Michael Burleigh
28 Apr 2013 02:32:29
Small Wars is strewn with such details. It is an odd book – at once a history of the end of European colonialism, an account of American foreign policy in the early cold war years, and a comparative study of counter-insurgency tactics. Spanning the two decades from the doomed attempt to restore European colonialism in the far east in 1945 to the beginnings of the Vietnam War, its self-contained chapters cover Korea, the Malayan emergency, Hungary, Suez, the war in Algeria, Mau Mau in Kenya and t... Read Full Story
A Place in the Country by WG Sebald
28 Apr 2013 02:29:25
This collection of essays on half a dozen figures mostly little read in English, including the 19th century Swiss writer Gottfried Keller and the Lutheran poet Eduard Mörike, seems at the outset to have all the attributes of a bottom-drawer manuscript, a scraping together of the inimitable East Anglian emigre's stray thoughts on the influences of his youth. The sense is quickly dispelled, however. Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability to make his own intellectual obsessions, however ab... Read Full Story
Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore
28 Apr 2013 02:26:03
It is a tricky deal being an authorised biographer. Charles Moore's big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: "I would have full access to herself… and to her papers. She would assist all my requests for interviews with others, including access to members of her family." With her support, the Cabinet Office was persuaded to allow him to truffle... Read Full Story
Luck by Ed Smith
25 Apr 2013 03:58:22
This may sound like a statement of the obvious. But there is more to success than hard work and application, and we should be grateful to Ed Smith for pointing it out in this brief but elegant and resonant book.
Smith's first career was as a cricketer; he applied himself, we learn here, to becoming the best. It was as if he had inhaled Gladwell's book before it had even been written. From the age of four, by his account, he would spend hours in front of the television, watching his hero, Geoffr... Read Full Story
Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk
25 Apr 2013 03:57:07
"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro‑Magnon Man …" Louis MacNeice, who wrote this nearly 80 years ago, could be excused a little poetic licence, but it is only 12 years since the distinguished evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould expressed more or less the same idea: "There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilisation we've built with the same body and brain." Not only has this become re... Read Full Story
Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore
25 Apr 2013 03:55:06
Moore was chosen by Thatcher to be her official biographer in 1997. It was the year her party finally lost power: her reputation, it was reasonable to assume, was going to need some protecting. "The arrangement that Lady Thatcher offered me," writes Moore, "was that I would have full access to herself … and to her papers. She would assist all my requests for interviews with others … As a result of her support … the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, gave permission for all existing and ... Read Full Story
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
23 Apr 2013 02:22:27
With The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid produced a thoroughly gripping and unsettling piece of "voice" writing in the first person, but the second person is a much trickier perspective to master. There's something accusatory about the narrational "you" that can sound wearyingly declarative, as though the writer were issuing a stream of instructions.
But Hamid is too deft a craftsman simply to bully the reader. Instead he seeks to create a more collusive enticement in How to Get Filthy Rich in ... Read Full Story
Slow Fade by Rudolph Wurlitzer
23 Apr 2013 02:20:22
The linchpin is control freak, drug-addled Hollywood director Wesley Hardin, a maniac and egomaniac, apparently based on legendary western auteur Sam Peckinpah. Wurlitzer had first-hand experience of his style: according to director Alex Cox, author of the introduction, Peckinpah "gutted" Wurlitzer's script of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The book begins by following the eventful adventures of opportunistic roadie AD Ballou — who, in the first chapter, gets his eye shot through by a crossbow-... Read Full Story
Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts
23 Apr 2013 02:17:54
Drysalter could also be described as a psalter (an intentional echo, one assumes). The drift is devotional; many poems read like secular prayers. Symmons Roberts has a gift for seeing the spirit in things even (as can happen in life) at unlikely moments and in bad weather (cars are unexpectedly present in his work – there is even something pushing an epiphany in a karaoke bar). And one cannot help noticing that summer is seldom mentioned. We tend to be in the bleak midwinter – but in his hands, ... Read Full Story
