The latest paperbacks reviewed.
The Turks Today. Andrew Mango, John Murray £8.99
Born in Turkey, and the author of a biography of Atatürk, Andrew Mango presents a comprehensive guide to the Turkish republic and its people. Beginning with a brief history of the nation, the book shows that despite sitting between Europe and the Middle East it has its own distinctive national identity. This examination of the country's history, institutions and people is testament to Mango's research and knowledge and he presents a persuasive case for re-examining this country, particularly in the light of its possible EU entry.
Eoghan Morrissey
Attention all Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast. Charlie Connelly Little, Brown £8.99
Broadcast four times daily on BBC Radio 4, the regular tones of the shipping forecast seem to comfort landlubber listeners as much as those afloat. Connelly has not written a meteorologist's or a seafarer's diary. He admits he doesn't know a millibar from a Milky Bar. Instead, the 31 sea areas covered by the shipping forecast act as pegs on which to hang a travel narrative. In Cork, "capital" of the Fastnet area, Connelly avoids buying a T-shirt saying "Michael Collins and Roy Keane: two Cork heroes shot in the back", while on the edge of the Shannon area, near Kilrush in Co Clare, the only piece of rubbish on the coast is a rusty sign saying "Don't litter! Blue flag beach". A comic tribute to a radio bulletin, Attention all Shipping is also a quirky history of the outposts of northern Europe.
Ralph Benson
Extreme Cuisine. Jerry Hopkins, Bloomsbury £12.99
In some Asian countries pet food means "sweet and sour dog" or "cat ragout" and tourists in France are often horrified by "saucissons d'âne" (donkey bangers) or minced horsemeat. Chacun à son goût and other cultures may find our "drisheen" equally distasteful. This Grand Guignol survey of the world's unorthodox eating habits - from "camel hoof paste" to "curried rat with noodles" - is luridly illustrated with colour photography. Swift's modest culinary proposal - a fat child stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled - has rarely seemed so appealing. Waiting lists for a table at the "best restaurant in the world", The Fat Duck in Bray (Berkshire, not the Wicklow riviera), which serves tobacco-flavoured chocolate and crab ice-cream, evince a public fascination with weird food. Hell's Kitchen chefs may enjoy this book but it will appal decent people who eat their dinner in the middle of the day.
Michael Parsons
A Sheltered Life: The Unexpected History of the Giant Tortoise. Paul Chambers, John Murray £8.99
Exploring the relationship between the giant-tortoise concentrations in the Indian and Pacific oceans, Chambers skilfully entwines 19th-century creationist-versus- evolutionist debates, Darwin's time on the Beagle and the genesis of The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Ecuadorian and Cold War politics, tortoise motorways and militaristic exploration, in an easy-to-read how-they-got-to- be-there biography. The Galapagos, Mascarene, Seychelles and Aldabra Islands all feature, as raiding posts and refuges for a motley crew of sailors, pirates, convicts and the odd industrialist, eager to eat, plunder or annihilate one of earth's oldest inhabitants for oil, meat or water. The narrative also records the work of early and modern conservationists and protectionists, including noted "save the tortoise" interventionist Albert Günther and Walter Rothschild, the madcap amateur scientist who was the Roman Abramovich of the Victorian natural world, building the "greatest natural history museum on earth" on the family estate.
Paul O'Doherty
Ezra Pound: Poems. Selected by Thom Gunn, Faber and Faber £3.99
Thom Gunn provides the foreword to this collection of poems by Ezra Pound, the man whom Gunn credits with "almost inadvertently" founding imagism. Included are extracts of his "most ambitious work", The Cantos, together with his Pisan Cantos written in an Allied prison camp at the end of the second World War, where the poet was held on charges of treason. Gunn forgives his support of Mussolini and instead celebrates the work of "the single most influential poet of the century". This edition is part of a charming series where a contemporary poet selects and introduces the works of a poet of the past. Thus, Gunn, again, presents the poems of Ben Jonson, while we also get Heaney on Wordsworth and Tom Paulin on Hardy, among others. The compilations provide a thorough introduction to the canon of each poet, while for many they will be a way to revisit words familiar and treasured.
Tom Cooney
So You Think You Know Jane Austen? A Literary Quizbook. John Sutherland and Deirdre Le Faye, Oxford's World Classics £4.99
Oxford University Press is renowned for its academic output and this book proves its accessibility too. Quizbooks about literary classics might not be everybody's idea of a good read but you should get a kick out of answering any of the questions in this book correctly. Based on the novels of Jane Austen, the four levels of difficulty mean you can just take a stab at the "Brass Tacks" level with whatever you remember from the Leaving Cert and then progress on to "The Interpretive Zone"; the in-between levels of "Factual but Tricky" and "Very Tricky and Occasionally Deductive" will tickle the Austen buff and educate the less informed. For those reading Austen for academic purposes the clear answers and insights could prove a valuable learning tool. If you can complete all four levels of the quiz you certainly already know your Austen - but you might need to get out a bit more.
Claire Looby