Reviews of the latest paperbacks.................'For politicians, scrupulous silence about the past is sometimes theright course. Historians have to remember, even - or especially -the most unwelcome aspects. But . . . others would do better to lookto the future than to a past which has been romanticised for present purposes'From The Irish Story by R.F. Foster......................................
The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, by R.F.Foster (Penguin, £7.99 sterling )
Roy Foster's latest collection of essays may not be quite the book his publishers would like us to believe it is, but it is still well worth dipping into for its sharp observations on the use and abuse of history and forays into the ideas and passions of notable Protestant Irishmen and women, from Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen to the Trinity historian F.S.L. Lyons and the wise and erudite Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler. Foster is also enjoyably scathing about the "ruthless sentimentality" of Gerry Adams and generally acute about Catholic nationalist small-mindedness and bigotry - the culture which, in the words of the Catholic Bulletin, liked to think of admiration for Joyce as "confined to the petty little field of the Anglo-Irish". A black mark, however, for the publisher's attempt, via the entirely irrelevant image of a pint of stout on the cover, to sell the book down-market as some kind of treasury of Irish craic and blather.
Enda O'Doherty
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis (Verso £14 sterling )
This is the Great Famine writ global, an ambitious, angry depiction of the murderous evil of imperialism on two continents. Thirty years after Ireland's catastrophe in the 1840s, some 30 million people died in famines in India, China and Brazil. Another 30 years later, 30 million people died as rains failed and crops rotted, in what Davis identifies as one of the worst tragedies in human history.
But all these disasters were largely man-made, he argues. Callous imperialism, over-exploitation of the land and muddled philosophies combined to create the conditions for what Davis controversially terms a "Holocaust". His main target is the force of globalisation; the victims of this book died as their labour and products were being "forcibly incorporated into the world's economic and political structures". It may not be a secret history, as the author claims, but it is unknown history, and every page astounds and shocks.
Paul Cullen
Goodly Barrow: A Voyage on an Irish River by T.F. O'Sullivan (Lilliput Press, €19.99)
It is almost two decades since a book about a voyage on an Irish waterway was published by Ward River Press. The author was Tadhg or "T.F." O'Sullivan, Irish ambassador in 11 foreign capitals and holder of the Légion d'honneur. While living abroad, part of his heart remained with the River Barrow. Rising out of an "enchanted spring" in the Slieve Bloom mountains, the Barrow is second only to the Shannon in length, at almost 120 miles or 192 kilometres. Between Athy, Co Kildare and St Mullins in the south-east, head of its tideway, 23 locks were built, and tended by keepers who lived in houses nearby.
Many of the chapters were first published in "draft" form in The Irish Times, thanks to the late Donal Foley. This was not a guidebook, the author warned, but an "excursion" through literature and history. As Theo Dorgan notes in his wonderful introduction to this new edition, "let book and river take hold of you in your dreaming . . ."
Lorna Siggins
Islomania, by Thurston Clarke (Abacus, £8.99 sterling)
Islomania isn't in any dictionaries - but it exists. Or why would an anonymous donor give £1.5 million so the people of Eigg could buy their tiny Hebridean island - and why would Thurston Clarke become so bewitched, beguiled and intoxicated that he would travel thousands of miles to visit islands around the world?
Clarke takes us along as his obsessive love affair leads him from the isolation of the Robinson Crusoe island to Grand Cayman's night life, the notorious cannibal island of Malekula, the Maldives (whose atolls are disappearing due to global warming) and the South Pacific island to discover their history, culture, people and politics and to find an answer to the question - how are islands different?
This is pure, idyllic escapism - for anyone who has ever dreamt of paradise.
Sarah Marriott
The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (Verso, £12 sterling)
In the authors' formula, borrowed from a popular 17th- and 18th- century metaphor, the Herculean labour was to make the north Atlantic safe for capitalism. They're definitely on the side of the hydra - the multi-faced modes of resistance that ordinary people employed against that project. The real heroes here are slaves, pirates, whores and diggers - whose ambition, was simply "liberty and fullness of sensuality". You don't have to buy the overarching "theory of everything" that links their struggles to enjoy the book's brilliant close reading of various previously obscure events from their history. Various more familiar landmarks line the path too, of course. But this is no academic slog - the bibliography includes Shakespeare and Blake as well as Marx - and should help this generation of opponents of capitalist globalisation to know its roots.
Harry Browne
Travels with a Tangerine, A Journey in the footnotes of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Picador, £7.99 sterling)
Award-winning travel writer, the erudite, witty and engaging Tim Mackintosh-Smith, brings the Middle Ages to the 21st century as he travels in the footsteps of the most famous Arab traveller, Ibn Battutah - the Tangerine (from Tangier) who set off for Mecca in 1325. By the time he returned, 29 years, 75,000 miles and 40 countries later, he had journeyed in "a world of miracles and mundanities, of sultans, scholars, saints and slave-girls".
While Mackintosh-Smith doesn't quite manage all that, his fascination with the eccentric Ibn Battutah and his love of the richly complex mosaic of Arab cultures and history takes him on the trek of a lifetime.
By turns entertaining, gossipy, fascinating, informative and gripping, this Arab scholar is an extraordinary storyteller.
Sarah Marriott
Who Owns Britain, by Kevin Cahill (Canongate, £16.99 sterling)
Cahill's fascination with the asset holdings of the British super-rich led to his discovery of The Return of Owners of Land (1872), the new Domesday Book. This "lost book" he contends, has been ignored for 120 years. It was the fruit of a parliamentary commission which bore the imprimatur of the politically powerful Earl of Derby: the earl wanted to refute the radical position taken by upstarts such as John Bright MP - based on the 1861 census of population - that a mere 30,000 landowners owned the whole of the UK.
When it emerged that Bright's hypothesis was largely intact, Domesday II disappeared in what Cahill describes as "perhaps the most astonishing case of calculated civic deceit ever performed on a whole country". From a non-elite viewpoint, virtually nothing had changed between the time of William the Conqueror and 1872 - in terms of the tight controls exercised by a tiny hereditary aristocracy. And that situation, Cahill establishes, pertains to the present day.
Colman Cassidy