New paperbacks reviewed
MilltownBy Pól Ó Muirí
Lagan Press, £6.99
The cover declares Milltownto be a novella, but novellas are supposed to weigh in at somewhere between 17,500 and 40,000 words and I'd guess that Milltownis a good deal slimmer than that. In these doom-and-gloom days, whether people will fork out a full-sized cover price for what is effectively one short story - well, who knows. Maybe we need to change our book-buying habits, though, because this beautifully-written miniature has a depth and resonance which many a novelist would envy. It's a Belfast story par excellence - affectionate, elegiac, prickly, humorous - but it's also the story of fathers and sons everywhere. Packed, somehow, into this handful of pages are a bookish father, a quiet mother, a shrewd priest, a football game, a scene in a chipper and the ugly red slash of political violence. And there's Joseph, the narrator, whose matter-of-fact tone gives the tale its uncommon luminosity. Ó Muiri mostly writes in Irish; on the evidence of Milltown, his English-language fictional voice is one we should be hearing much more often.
Arminta Wallace
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
By Oliver Sacks Picador, £8.99
There are rare humans who may lack the neural apparatus for appreciating music but for most of us, it has great power. Sacks is a neurologist, music lover and gifted writer who shows that while music can calm, animate or comfort us, "it may be especially powerful and have great therapeutic potential for patients with a variety of neurological conditions". Some of the conditions explored are Alzheimer's disease (music can help sufferers by restoring them to themselves) and aphasia (sufferers can be taught to speak again through singing). People with the rare congenital disorder Williams syndrome never develop beyond the mental abilities of a toddler but can play back any piece of music after just one hearing. Sacks presents a cast of ordinary people with extraordinary stories, such as the 42-year-old orthopaedic surgeon who was struck by lightning and developed a passion for listening to and playing music.
Brian Maye
Sport: Almost Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
By Tim Harris
Yellow Jersey Press, £14.99
An attempt to explain, in 900-plus pages, how the major world sports developed over 3,000 years might be expected to be an arduous read, but Harris's entertaining and insightful book is broken down into sections such as the development of arenas, how the rules evolved, the use of drugs, and the media, and within those sections into bite-sized sub-headings to enable the less dedicated to pick and choose the nuggets of interest to them. A must-read for table quiz afficionados, or for anybody interested in impressing friends with their knowledge of how modern football developed from an often violent English public-school free-for-all, why strychnine became popular among early 19th-century athletes, how snooker acquired its name and much more besides.
Ciaran Murray
Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769-1799
Philip Dwyer
Bloomsbury £9.99
One of the most controversial figures in modern European history, Napoleon played no small part in cultivating a public image to suit the purposes of his ambition. Dwyer says he may have been the first person to pretend to avoid public acclaim in order to attract it. This even-handed and readable account of Napoleon's career concentrates on his early life, from his birth in Corsica until the coup of November (Brumaire) in 1799. He was then, at 30 years of age, the most powerful man in the most powerful country in Europe. We learn of the various roles of his life, including the soldier, the politician, the lover - he was head over heels in love with Josephine, while she may have taken the occasional lover. He was - obviously - talented, intelligent and passionate, and also devious, short-tempered and ruthless. Nor did he lack self-belief; he was firmly convinced he was destined to play a great role in history. How right he was.
Owen Dawson
The Great Books
Anthony O'Hear
Icon Books, £10.99
"Great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help." Infused with this conviction, philosophy lecturer and self-confessed "literary enthusiast" Anthony O'Hear embarks upon what is clearly a labour of love. The Great Booksis both an informative guide to the classics of western literature and an insightful exposition of their enduring relevance. All the greats are included - from Homer and Virgil through to Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare. So too are the oft-forgotten and under-rated Pascal and Racine. O'Hear systematically introduces each work with a brief overview, followed by an examination of its literary and cultural impact - the most memorable is his dismissal of Joyce's Ulyssesas a "somewhat clunking attempt to transpose [its] details to the streets of Leopold Bloom's Dublin". There are flashes of real insight - The Canterbury Tales is summed up as a learned work which nevertheless "carries its learning lightly" - but overall this remains more Leaving Cert textbook than bedtime reading.
Freya McClements