Irish Times reviewers look at this week's selection of paperbacks.
Stupid White Men - and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. Michael Moore. Penguin Books £7.99
Perhaps the most important thing about this book is its provenance. Moore's publishers baulked at releasing a vicious and funny assault on the Establishment immediately after 9/11 (including a detailed and sustained examination of how the forces behind "President" Bush orchestrated the Florida coup) even though they had already printed 50,000 copies. In response, Moore began an Internet campaign to embarrass HarperCollins over this post-modern censorship. It worked (obviously), and the book has been top of the bestsellers list pretty much ever since. This edition is aimed at the British and Irish market (Moore is quite proud of his Irish heritage - still, better to draw a veil over the passage concerned with Northern Ireland), and includes a new epilogue which challenges Bush over his oil links with Saudi and the family bin Laden. It is funny. It is vicious. It is thought-provoking. It might even get you to act. - Joe Culley
Goodnight, God Bless and Safe Home Finbarr O'Keefe O'Brien €15.95
While this slim memoir of the Showband phenomenon might not match the more substantial Send 'Em Home Sweatin', it nevertheless remains a highly enjoyable read from one of the era's many foot soldiers. O'Keefe was a member of The Saints, later formed the Las Vegas Showband and spent most of his teenage years and beyond performing in the breeze-block basilicas known as the ballrooms. He reminiscences about his own part in the Showband days, and also highlights some interesting/amusing facts about the era (e.g. no dancing was allowed by Parish priests during the seven weeks of Lent). It's evocative, too, of a time when girls wore A-line dresses and beehive hairdos (a great chat-up line: "Lovely hair - did you knit it yourself?"), when stars were heartthrobs and not sex symbols. Days gone, certainly - but as books such as these attest to, not forgotten. - Tony Clayton-Lea
The Hero's Walk Anita Rau Badami Bloomsbury, £6.99
Sripathi lives in a small Indian coastal town with the wife and son he no longer knows, his appalling old mother, his tragic spinster sister and a horde of regrets kept carefully at bay. The sort of repressed character who vents what passes for his emotions - usually irritation - by writing heated letters to newspapers, Sripathi is an anti-heroic misery. Among his mistakes was allowing his anger at his prized daughter's marriage to a foreigner to ban her from his life. The folly of this eventually backfires on him when news comes from Canada that Maya and her husband have died in a car crash leaving a seven year-old, Sripathi's grand-daughter, an orphan. Even by the high standards of Indian domestic tragicomedy, this is a rich, tactile performance, with stories within stories and inspired asides. The characterisation, particularly that of Sripathi's tyrannical, embittered old mother, who spends her days talking to pictures of the dead husband who betrayed her in life, is outstanding. - Eileen Battersby
The Anatomy School Bernard MacLaverty Vintage, £6.99
There are different ways to discover the secrets of the human body, as Martin Brennan, this book's young protagonist discovers. One is by dissection (corpses), another is through foreplay (living girl). The first half of MacLaverty's most recent novel, however, exhibits a Martin in ignorance of almost everything, particularly in contrast to his mates Kavanagh (tall, charismatic boy perfect) and Blaise Foley (cynical intellectual dissident). As they prepare to undermine the examination system, Martin find himself anxiously juggling schoolboy and civic honour, religious morality and adolescent want, fear and duty. MacLaverty's ability to craft explosively funny situations and dialogue without caricature, and to retain a beating heart at the centre of each narrative, makes him one of the most enjoyable authors writing today. - Christine Madden
Pleasing Myself: From Beowulf to Philip Roth Frank Kermode Penguin, £8.99
Was Jack B. Yeats a great painter or (just) a great Irish painter? Can a synthetic literary forgery, concocted in a spirit of malice, still have genuine aesthetic value? And what pure knowledge can we distil from a compendious new history of dirt and stench? It is not today nor yesterday that Prof Kermode retired from university teaching. That he is still on absolute intellectual top form is amply evidenced by this new collection of review-essays on literature, art, history and philosophy, many first published in the London Review of Books. The review-essay of 2,500-4,500 words is, as Kermode says, a "satisfactory genre", in which the compact between writer and reader dictates that the former should perform as an educated audience has a right to expect - without jargon or vainglorious display - and the latter take pleasure in a "mildly strenuous bit of reading". And the professor does indeed do exactly what it says on the tin. - Enda O'Doherty