The Irish Times reviews a selection of the latest paperbacks.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander, Harper Perennial, £8.99
Anyone who has ever seen the Hollywood-slanted 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton (William Bligh) and Clark Gable (Fletcher Christian) will never be convinced otherwise: Christian was bullied and Bligh got his comeuppance. However, Alexander, following a long line of other Bountyologists (film-makers, novelists and pseudo-historians alike), offers a more detailed, well-researched insight into the infamous mutiny. Her exhaustive, multi-faceted exploration - from the Thames to Tahiti and back - digs up a lot more than the breadfruits that were the expedition's original raison d'être. The narrative follows the protagonists up to and including the mutiny in 1789, the capture of some of the mutineers, the trials and retributions that followed, and the legacy and myths perpetuated. Paul O'Doherty
Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Lowell Hawthorne is an unlikely central character for a spy thriller. Living apart from his wife and children, paranoid and miserable, the painter-decorator has never been able to come to terms with the death of his mother in a hijacking when he was 16. Then his estranged father, a former American spy, dies in suspicious circumstances and one of the hijack survivors, Sam, who is trying to piece together what really happened on that Air France flight in 1987, keeps pestering him. Hawthorne's legacy from his father is a collection of tapes and documents that reveal not only what happened but his father's part in it. Turner Hospital is a powerful writer - the section where 10 hostages are trapped in a bunker lives long in the mind. There's enough technical detail to please diehard spy fans and plenty of literary references to make readers new to the genre feel on home turf. Bernice Harrison
Regarding the Pain of Others bySusan Sontag, Penguin, £7.99
This long-awaited sequel to the 1977 classic On Photography appears all the more compelling given its "obscenely topical" subject - images of pain and, more specifically, war photography. This, like its predecessor, is essentially a photography book without photographs. Sontag explores how images of war inform our perception of others' pain, and how the viewer's distance, in space and time, coupled with a saturation of such images, have created an increasingly numbed response. The tendency to go searching for the images in question quickly diminishes with Sontag's descriptions, from the American Civil War to the ongoing Iraqi war and from the iconic to the little-known. Although the essays are accessible, it is not an easy read as philosophy, feminism and pragmatism are enveloped into a rich blend of ideas and strongly held beliefs about how images of pain raise questions about human nature. Mark McGrath
The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler, Vintage, £6.99
Anne Tyler's latest novel begins in 1941, the year of her own birth; but even if she could not have been there, she captures with memorable vividness the December day, soon after Pearl Harbour, when Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay fall in love. Every young man in St Cassian's, a Polish enclave of East Baltimore, is stepping up to join the war and Michael feels fearless to do the same. His war is a harmless one, but their lives will never be the same; the seeds of spilt authority and resentment have been sown. This is a fine portrait not just of a marriage under strain, but of an America that is shifting, growing, uncertain of itself; Tyler sweeps her compelling cast - husband and wife, troubled children, mysterious grandson - through the 20th century, twisting their fates, changing their futures with a confidence that, though almost ruthless, is compelling. Belinda McKeon
The Faber Book of Exploration by Benedict Allen, Faber, €9.99
Oh, what tales await the reader who peeks between the covers of Benedict Allen's Faber Book of Exploration! We have Hernan Cortes's description of Teximitan as he stands atop a giant pyramid surveying the majesty of the ancient Aztec metropolis shortly before razing it. We share in the adventures of Rene "Aguste Caille" who spent three years mastering Arabic so that he might gain entry to the then forbidden city of Timbuktu. Allen divides his book into regions, seas, landfalls and forests, and gives a brief biography of each explorer. And what a rag-tag collection of individuals they prove to be: religious fanatics (Mildred Cable), scientists (Alexander Humboldt) and imperialist profiteers (Francis Drake). The book highlights the perilously thin line dividing exploration from exploitation and just how often that line was crossed. Ken Walshe
John Lydon: The Sex Pistols, PiL & Anti-Celebrity by Ben Myers, Independent Music Press, £12.99
Despite his equal parts engaging and shameful appearance on last year's I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here reality television show, former Sex Pistol John Lydon was still the best thing about it. A sense of the man's blend of wanton arrogance and almost touching fealty to the notion of a Great Britain permeates this educational if standard music biography. It touches on the man's iconic status, his erstwhile Public Enemy No 1 persona, the desertion of his punk rock legacy and his post-Pistols band, PiL (Public Image Limited), but it simply doesn't get anywhere close to what drives him. Mired by a style that is perfunctory at best, sedated at worst, Myers ticks off the events in Lydon's post-Pistols life in time-honoured fashion, but the core subject - regardless of extensive, highly amusing cut-and-paste quotes - remains ever-elusive. Tony Clayton-Lea