This week's paperback releases reviewed
Venice: Pure City
Peter Ackroyd
Vintage, £9.99
Peter Ackroyd's lengthy study of Venice is certainly not a guidebook – no recommendations for restaurants here, folks – nor, despite the brilliance of its descriptive passages, does it give a particularly physical sense of the city's layout and orientation. Instead Ackroyd writes about Venice as an idea, with stylish meditations on such topics as time, light, water, sexuality, politics and psychopathology. He's very good on Venetian painting, and on the city's perennial sense of being under threat; and he makes a leitmotif of Venice's historical ties to the Middle East, which he says have contributed to its ambiguous position in (but not quite of) Europe. He writes so well that at times he'd drive you mad – "Venice represented an idea that was itself eternal" – but if you just climb into his gondola and go where he takes you, the rewards are great indeed. Arminta Wallace
The Greatest Trade Ever
Gregory Zuckerman
Penguin, £9.99
While his peers made and subsequently lost billions on sub-prime mortgage investments, the then unremarkable hedge fund manager John Paulson crafted one of history's most lucrative financial transactions by betting against the housing bubble. Gregory Zuckerman's book documents Paulson's astonishing prescience in sensing the gross overvaluation of residential property, from which he earned $3.7bn in 2007 alone. Zuckerman paints Paulson's success against a backdrop of over-exuberance on Wall Street and a blind confidence in the value of housing. The Wall Street Journalcolumnist simplifies complex financial trades into plain English, and provides an excellent summary of the causes of the American economy's collapse. Nonetheless, the more technical sections of the book may prove hard work for those who are not keen students of the world of finance. Hugh McDowell
Lowboy
John Wray
Canongate, £7.99
James Wray's third novel is a thrilling and chilling tale of pursuit as Lowboy, a teenage boy suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, escapes from his care facility, and his medication, and flees down into the New York underground system. The narrative of his flight and subsequent adventures runs parallel to the narrative of his mother's attempts to locate him with the help of a detective. Wray skilfully inhabits the mind of his young, mentally ill protagonist and seeing the world from his unbalanced perspective is sometimes terrifying. Like a highly sensitive radio antenna, Lowboy has picked up on all the fears of the public, is obsessed with the idea of global warming and is very aware of war, terrorism and the clash of world religions. The whole novel is suffused with an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia and all the characters seem to circle each other warily. Lowboy declares at one stage, "The order of the world is not my order", and maybe his feeling of helplessness in a dangerous world is one that many of us could identify with. Ann McCarry
Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands
Aatish Taseer
Canongate, £8.99
It's not often that we have to take travel writing seriously. We have Arabian Nightsto thank for exotic cliches of the Orient, and colonial literature has much to answer for. But this story is tenacious, framed by a son's pilgrimage to his estranged father. Aatish Taseer is an affluent Pakistani-Indian raised in London. He is a composite of racial tensions, or "hybrid" in post-colonial parlance, preoccupied by Islamic identity. He reflects on exclusion, as felt by the London bombers from provincial Beeston as much as by himself. The author shares such grievances as "the clutter of modernity" as he tries to explain why Islamic hardliners have come to hate the West, and finds Teheran "addictive ''. He visits an abyss of regimes and faces their horrors – morally censored Iran, the police states of Saudi Arabia and Syria, and the complex democracy of Pakistan during Benazir Bhutto's assassination. The frankness of a memoir prevails, as strains of local character and a keen sense of the absurd keep the book on its toes. Maggie Armstrong
The Sixties
Jenny Diski
Profile , £7.99
“If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there”, the rock musician and supreme counterculturalist Paul Kantner said (or allegedly said, because nobody can remember properly). Pop, sex, money, beauty, films, freedom and feminism were all invented back then. Yet the period is increasingly being blamed for much that has gone wrong in society since. Diski re-opens this debate in her witty memoir of the period that supposedly allowed liberation and self-
invention, asking whether the 1960s were as much fun and as groundbreaking as they sound. Apparently not. And Diski questions whether she and her peers were really changing the world – or just re-inventing ideas that had been germinated as far back as the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. The book is a celebration of Diski's youth, even with its faults and failures, and concludes that as you age "the centre drifts away from you" and that in reality every period belongs to the young. Lorraine Courtney
