A selection of paperbacks reviewed by Irish Times critics
No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923
Sinéad McCoole
O'Brien Press, NPG
Could you name more than two Irish women activists from the revolutionary period? How about 73? As author, historian and curator Sinéad McCool reveals, there is far more to early female nationalism than Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz. Four chapters trace the common path of the women whose biographies follow, with informative appendices of prisoner lists, all interspersed with photos of memorabilia. Though many women came to the cause through family connections, they also included war widows, well-travelled medics, politicians, shopkeepers, and pig farmer's daughters. All persevered in their struggle through great hardship, violence, and in many cases, imprisonment. No Ordinary Women is a useful reference which reasserts the place of women in the foundation of the State.
Nora Mahony
Someone to Run With
David Grossman, translated by Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz
Bloomsbury Books, £7.99
Fifteen-year-old Assaf is working for Jerusalem's City Sanitation Department when, one summer's day, he is given the task of finding and fining the owner of a stray dog. Tamar, the dog's owner, meanwhile, finds herself deep in the gritty underworld of the city's streets, hell-bent on rescuing her drug-addict friend. Grossman's tale of two young souls drawn together by the stray animal, deals beautifully with the harsh realities of urban loneliness and the awkward journey from adolescence to adulthood, striking a chord with anyone who ever dared to question life's irrationality. He captures the humour and pain, frustration and untamed energy of both main characters, as well as the violence and crime they encounter. This is a story that connects and informs, entertains and unsettles - and pumps with humanity.
Tom Cooney
How To Be Alone
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate, £8.99
Before Franzen hit paydirt with The Corrections, he was busy building a reputation as a sharp literary and social commentator and this collection covers his essays from 1996-2001. What makes it particularly interesting is how it begins with him searching through dumpsters in search of furniture and other cast-offs, but ends with him jousting with Oprah Winfrey after he refuses to allow her to use The Corrections for her famous - and ultimately lucrative - book club. It's no surprise, then, that many of these articles deal with the angst of being a writer and the place of the novel in a mass-media world. He is also pre-occupied with the notions of privacy and solitude on a busy planet. While most showcase his thrilling way with language, the opening essay, 'My Father's Brain', which charts how his father succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease, is especially erudite, touching and witty.
Shane Hegarty
Bay of Tigers
Pedro Rosa Mendes
Grants, £8.99
Africa is a country in love with two things, war and magic, and Bay of Tigers is steeped in both. This is an unconventional book: Mendes's stories and characters, drawn from a wartime trip through Angola in 1997, fall out of the pages like excitable children, blurt out their stories in all their eerie absurdity and disappear again into the undergrowth. There is little in the way of ordinary narrative, the expected beginnings, middles and ends compressed into short intense bursts of Africa. Comparisons with Kapuscinski are inevitable, but this is a completely different animal. Although both writers prefer the jungle trails to the diplomatic routes, Mendes favours the surreal compassionate heart of Angola. An accomplished and energetic book about "the calmness of fear, the vitality of death".
Laurence Mackin
The Invention of Dr Cake
Andrew Motion
Faber and Faber, £6.99
Apparently this is a tale of a series of deathbed visits by a Dr William Tabor, who published a few poems and whose archive, allegedly, is in the Royal College of Surgeons. The visits take place at the country house of the dying Dr Cake who might, or just might not be, John Keats. The fancy is that Keats did not die in Rome, aged 25, but returned to London and became a conscientious doctor. Among the themes vying with one another in this slim prose work are: the "venom and stupidity" of reviewers, transience and the nature of poetic inspiration. The trouble is, the reader becomes bored with the visits and the pointless wondering whether the Irish housekeeper, Mrs Reilly, might inherit or marry or both. Biographies, memoirs and histories are not limited to verifiable facts about a person, and for that we are usually grateful. However, this book is such a fabrication that this reader lost her patience.
Kate Bateman
Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Pocket Books, £7.99
While charting the first hundred years of Henri Desgrange's great race, from its humble beginnings outside the Café au Reveil-Matin on the first ever stage, to the now regular assaults on L'Alpe d'Huez and Tourmalet, and its pivotal position as the greatest cycle race on the planet, Wheatcroft documents cycling's blue riband within the milieu of world and European history and with the spirit and endeavour of an honest Johnny-come-lately cycling enthusiast. This is a broad, twisting, year-by-year reference guide for anyone with even a passing interest in professional cycling, chronicling the peloton's great generals, including Anquetil, Merckx and Hinault. In cycling parlance, though, this history is more super domestique than maillot jaune, more a Michael Broadbent butcher's-bike ride than a saddle-sore sweaty tactical investigation.
Paul O'Doherty