Latest paperback publications reviewed.
The Oxford Companion to the Brontës Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith Oxford University Press, £14.99
For the Brontaholic, or even the mild imbiber at the Haworth well, this book is a must. Everything you've ever wanted to know about the lives and works of this extraordinary family is here - and much more besides. To give some idea of how comprehensive this companion is, there is even a perceptive section on film adaptations of the works. I went straight to the entry on Emily, and I wasn't disappointed. Charlotte's quoted comment on her summed her up: "Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished." Or the comment of a servant, who described the child Emily with "the eyes of a half-tamed creature" who cared little for anybody's opinion and was happier with her pets. The Irish links are covered as well. A treasure trove of a book.
Brian Maye
All of These People Fergal Keane Harper Perennial, £7.99
In an interview in this edition of his memoir, the BBC foreign correspondent reveals he originally intended to write a "state of the world" book, from the vantage point of a war reporter. But in the same way that his emotions are often laid bare in his news reports, this story became in the telling a deeply personal, soul-baring account of his own life. It is a life dominated by his relationship with his father, the actor Éamonn Keane, and the struggle with alcoholism they shared, a struggle Keane recounts with unstinting directness. The book is also dominated by a conservative Catholic 1960s Ireland, still riven by Civil War politics. Keane evokes that era with an eye for the telling detail. Finally, there are the wars he has witnessed, the genocide in Rwanda having had a particularly profound effect on him. In this, as throughout the book, Keane impresses with the power of his honesty.
Davin O'Dwyer
Wall Street: A Cultural History Steve Fraser Faber £ 12.99
This book manages to use a narrow subject, the history of Wall Street, to describe and explain a far bigger one: America. The street derived its name from a bulwark built by slaves and Native Americans to prevent the then tiny, but commercially highly successful Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam from the marauding British. From these primordial beginnings the new nation emerged and rapidly expanded westwards. Fraser describes this process and Wall Street's hand in it; the financing of the railways, ports and land acquisition. He also points out that from the start Wall Street was viewed with suspicion as a haven for confidence men, speculators and montebanks. Suspicions and contradictions have dogged it ever since and Fraser expertly examines them using cultural, political and economic history to get to the heart of the American character.
Ken Walshe
The Penguin Guide to Superstitions in Britain & Ireland Steve Roud Penguin Books, £10.99
You might imagine in our seemingly sophisticated times that people in these islands would have left behind those hoary old superstitions from an unenlightened distant past. But you'd be wrong. You really think people don't avoid walking under ladders, or have mixed feelings about passing a black cat, or fret about breaking a mirror, or search desperately for a second magpie? From the powers of flowers and plants to the pre-Hitchcockian menace of birds, all superstitions are here. But eminent folklorist Steve Roud's award-winning book is more than a wonderful historical and geographical catalogue of our superstitions, it is also a work of great scholarship, which will inform as much as entertain. A warning to our readers who write letters about hearing the first cuckoo of spring: let's just say the word "cuckold" comes into it. Roud has given us a gem, DG.
John Moran
To Travel Hopefully: Journal of a Death Not Foretold Christopher Rush Profile Books, £7.99
In 1878, at the age of 28, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled the Cévennes with a donkey in an effort to overcome his despair at the end of a relationship, and later wrote a book about his experiences, Travels With A Donkey. When the Scottish novelist and teacher Christopher Rush's wife died of breast cancer in 1993, leaving him with two young children and severe depression, he sought to alleviate his grief by following in the footsteps of his literary hero. This memoir is divided between an almost unreadably harrowing account of his wife's swift decline and death - a decline rendered all the more frustratingly tragic due to her state of denial and resistance to treatment - and Rush's redemptive journey to France. Powerfully life affirming, it charts the depths to which a soul can sink, and the effort required to lift it once more.
Davin O'Dwyer
Moon Dust : In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth Andrew Smith Bloomsbury, £8.99
Smith's analysis of the Apollo Moon programme takes us from his Californian sitting room in 1969 - where as a teenager he watched the moon-landing from behind his parents' settee - to the super-geek celebrity-trails that congregate at Star Trek conventions hoping to glimpse the now septuagenarian-plus moonwalkers. He tracks down the nine surviving lunar astronauts with varying degrees of success, and attempts to uncover, despite their now well-practiced party-pieces and glib patter, what it was really like to play, shout and scream on another planet, an experience only 12 men shared. Despite a stream-of-consciousness approach that jumps about too much for comfort , it's still a stimulating page-turner (once you persevere) filled with space gossip, intergalactic bitching and sea-of-tranquillity post-traumatic shock.
Paul O'Doherty