A selection of paperbacks reviewed
Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin, Granta, £7.99
When she graduated from university in the US in 1994, Rachel DeWoskin headed to China in search of adventure. She got more than she bargained for. Through a mixture of despair at her job in corporate PR and a language-related lack of understanding of what she was actually letting herself in for, she accepted a role as the lead "foreign babe" in the TV series that gives her book its title. A kind of Chinese Sex and the City, it drew 600 million viewers each week. DeWoskin was paid $80 per episode for playing an American foreign exchange student who falls for a married Chinese man - a role for which the costume department decked her out in big hair, frosted lips, rhinestone earrings and a full-length fur coat.
The parallels - and differences - between her TV role and her own life as a foreigner in a rapidly modernising and westernising city fuel DeWoskin's well-written, fascinating account of her time there. She is a keen and fair-minded observer, tolerant of cultural misunderstandings on both sides, and breezy in the face of vicissitudes such as her bleak, overpriced apartment, and the sight of skinned dog carcasses hanging on street stalls (she is a vegetarian). Likeable, literate and sensitive to her host country's customs and mores, she never forgets that she is a guest, lucky to be able to watch as "the world's longest continuous civilisation lurched inexorably into the 21st century". Cathy Dillon
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It by Thomas de Zengotita, Bloomsbury, £8.99
Is there anyone out there who has never had a "where was I on 9/11?" conversation, or discussed their reaction upon hearing about the death of Princess Diana? Not many, because as US academic and cultural commentator de Zengotita points out, we are all "mediated" now. If you can get past sentences rendered opaque by academic jargon such as "representational flattery and optionality's role in the virtualization process" - and there is rather more of that than there should be - then you will be able to treasure a genuinely perception-altering examination of modern life.
Taking up where Marshall McLuhan left off, de Zengotita examines our postmodern existence, and the self-absorbed way we experience the world - our reactions to events are, like a method actor's, performances meant to convey authenticity, rather than genuinely authentic. He then trains these insights on topics such as adolescent use of the word "like" to the war on terror. For anyone with an interest in how our culture functions, Mediated is an essential read. Davin O'Dwyer
No Strings Attached by Clare Dowling, Headline Review, €15.99
Weddings are such wonderful occasions. The bride makes lists to ensure the day will be the happiest of her life, the mother of the bride goes on a series of last-chance diets and prays that her vibrant purple outfit is the colour of the season. And sometimes the bridegroom gets a sudden attack of cold feet at the reappearance of his commitment-free best man, and takes off to France. Without warning. Two days before the wedding.
Clare Dowling's new book serves up a cocktail of fun as librarian Judy and her doctor fiancé Barry approach their long-awaited big day. If life is what happens when you're making other
plans, then Judy hasn't been living for a very long time, but everything changes with the arrival of Lenny, the best man
and the sexiest man ever born in Judy's home town. From the first page you'll delight in being a spectator as the nuptial preparations go from the unexpected to the truly bewildering. Claire Looby
Bloodstains in Ulster by Tom McAlindon, The Liffey Press, €11.95
On Easter Saturday in 1949, Mary McGowan, a 54-year-old middle-class Catholic, was brutally assaulted in her north Belfast home. She died three days later, but not before she identified her assailant as Robert Taylor, a young painter from Tiger's Bay - a nearby loyalist ghetto - who had previously carried out work in her house.
Robert the Painter, as he was soon nicknamed, was arrested and charged with her murder. Corroborating evidence and an alibi that proved to be a tissue of lies made for an open-and-shut case. Yet, although found guilty, he escaped the hangman's noose and walked free.
Tom McAlindon's judicious research digs deep to expose the personalities beneath the wigs, and to unearth the truth about a blatant miscarriage of justice. What he finds is a society suffocated by sectarianism and an establishment implicated in the deliberate sabotage of the legal system. An absorbing story and a signpost to the region's subsequent troubles. Martin Noonan