A selection of paperbacks reviewed by The Irish Times
Seeking Rapture: A Memoir
Kathryn Harrison
Fourth Estate, £7.99
These autobiographical essays bravely dissect the troubled relationship between grandmother, mother and daughter. The narrative comes from the dark interior landscape of the adult daughter. The tone is dispassionate and the writing is almost robotically controlled against expressions of unconstrained love, although there are tantalising glimpses of a husband, children, friends and what sounds like any reasonably happy home. Denied maternal love, the author recounts how she sought rapture through religion, mortifying her flesh, suffering anorexia, living in unnecessarily squalid digs and running the gauntlet of shoplifting. There are grotesquely comic descriptions of the family's failures in cat-breeding and her own battles against the ticks and lice in her children's hair. Her aim, unfulfilled in this book, is to find enlightenment through bearing witness to everything, negative and positive.
Olivia Hamilton
Pointing From the Grave
Samantha Weinberg
Penguin, £7.99
A fascinating trawl through the history of forensic science, from the dawn of fingerprinting to the advent of DNA testing, articulated as a backdrop to the tale of a woman who helped solve her own murder. Helena Greenwood was an English scientist working in San Francisco on DNA research when, in 1985, an intruder, Paul Frediani, sexually assaulted her in her home. While awaiting trial, he tracked her down to her new address in southern California and brutally murdered her, thus eliminating the sole witness to the crime. 14 years later, research that Greenwood helped pioneer was used to finally convict Frediani of her murder. In a clever we-know-who-done-it, mixing numerous case studies from Sherlock Holmes to the O.J. Simpson "dream team" antics of Johnnie Cochrane, Robert Shapiro and DNA experts Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, Weinberg shines a torch on the sophistication of modern genetic fingerprinting.
Paul O'Doherty
A Mighty Heart
Mariane Pearl
Virago, £7.99
Journalists aren't immune from the disasters about which they report, as the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Pearl in early 2002 bore witness. While pregnant, his journalist wife Mariane Pearl endured the horror of his capture, the agony of her ignorance of his whereabouts and wellbeing, the frenzy of the search and the endless grief at the butchery of his death. In this book, destined for cinema, she recounts in minute detail the events of those weeks, embedded in the larger backdrop of their love for each other and life together. The book is particularly riveting due to the many potential subjects for debate on political, ethical and sociological themes, many of which, due to the nature of the work, she only skims the surface.
Christine Madden
When The Women Come Out To Dance
Elmore Leonard
Penguin, £7.99
"By the same author", it says on the inside cover. The list which follows is awesome: 38 books, many of them classics of the crime genre, some - most notably Get Shorty - even classic movies. But When The Women Come Out To Dance isn't really by the same author at all. This collection of nine stories, most of them published elsewhere during the 1990s, takes Leonard way out into classic western territory: a world of misfits and losers, gone-to-seed baseball players, insurance investigators, bank robbers and neo-Nazis; a world of harsh sunlight and razor-sharp shadows where everything moves with lazy ease - until suddenly you find yourself turning the last page. From any crime writer this would be an impressive collection. From an 80-year-old crime writer, it's phenomenal.
Arminta Wallace
Telegram from Guernica: the Extraordinary Life of George Steer
Nicholas Rankin
Faber and Faber, £9.99
George Steer was 35 when he died in a car crash in Burma on Christmas Eve 1944. As a foreign correspondent for The Times in the 1930s, he had a Zelig-like ability to be in the right place at the right time. In Ethiopia, his first assignment, he broke the story of Italy's use of poison gas and the bombing of civilians. Two years later it was his despatches from Guernica that alerted the world to Germany's air support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Nicholas Rankin's superbly researched book manages to be a gripping history of the years before the second World War and a ripping good adventure told with the historian's eye for detail and the story-telling ability of a novelist.
Martin Noonan
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Virago, £7.99
In The Handmaid's Tale (1986), the future looked bad for women. In this polemical jaunt it has become a full-scale surrealist nightmare for everyone. Atwood, never the most comforting of writers, is possessed of a chilling magpie intelligence, boxes of research notes, black humour and sufficient irony to pierce the thickest complacency. Her barbed preview of exactly where our over-modified messing with human genetics, breeding, farming practices and just about everything else will lead our few doomed survivors, should scare the living daylights out of most readers. Grotesque and often funny, this overblown, weirdly offbeat fable earned the astute Canadian a fifth Man Booker prize shortlisting (she won with her fourth in 2000). There are moments of pathos, but ultimately the novel is too ironic, too farcically bleak and far too knowingly clever. Atwood's heavily satiric tone consistently overpowers her post-apocalyptic narrative, leaving it contrived and a bit laboured.
Eileen Battersby