Determined to have that must-have book for a perfect Christmas present? Here, specialists and critics recommend titles that stood out in a selection of genres in the year gone by.
Politics & Current affairs/John Horgan
If ever journalism stamped its imprint on the book trade, it was in 2002 with Conor O'Clery and Siobhán Creaton's masterly excavation of the AIB Rusnak episode, Panic at the Bank; How John Rusnak Lost AIB $691, 000, 000 (Gill and Macmillan, €10 99), and Paul Cullen's With a Little Help from my Friends (Gill and Macmillan, €12.99), an essential guidebook to the tribunals. Then there was what was described in the book trade as "a fast-moving bestseller" when it was published in September - the second instalment in the Flood trilogy. Queues formed outside the Government Publications Office and at one point its telephone system crashed as the public rushed to buy Justice Flood's deliberations for the modest sum of €1, with many snapping up two or three copies or buying it on CD.
Then there was Ed Moloney's Secret History of the IRA (Allen Lane, £20), to which Brian Feeney's book Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years (O'Brien Press, €17.95 ) is a very necessary complement (why did nobody think of writing this book before now?).
Geraldine Kennedy's elevation to Smyllie's chair does not, I hope, prevent a reference to the job of work she did in editing The Irish Times Nealon's Guide to the 29th Dáil and Seanad (Gill and Macmillan, €24.99), although I suppose she won't have much time left for doing books now.
It would be a pity, however, if these high-profile books overshadowed some of the more slow-burning offerings. Among those should be included Michael Marsh and Michael Gallagher's root and branch study of Fine Gael, Days of Blue Loyalty (PSAI Press, €25.40), a handy companion in its own way for Garret FitzGerald's evergreen book of observations, Reflections on the Irish State (Irish Academic Press, €32.50). Kevin Rafter's Martin Mansergh:A Biography is a notable contribution on the other side of the Civil War divide (New Island, €14.99).
Ranging further afield, the two Irish Academic Press books, Irish Secrets: German Espionage in Wartime Ireland, 1939-45, by Mark Hull (€49.50), and the Eunan O'Halpin-edited, and tongue-in-cheek titled MI5 and Ireland, 1939-45 - The Official History (€24.50) are page-turners for those of us who turn pages at a more leisurely rate.
And now for something completely different: try Colin Murphy and Lynne Adair's Untold Stories - Protestants in the Republic of Ireland 1922-2002 (Liffey Press, €21.50). They haven't gone away, you know.
Food/Louise East
With Jamie's Kitchen (Michael Joseph, £25), Mr Oliver has grown up a little, and the resulting recipes are slightly more complex but just as enticing. Nigella Lawson's offering is Forever Summer (Chatto & Windus, £20 ) - not particularly seasonal, but a good one to pore over during the dark months. Of the rest, Delia's Vegetarian Collection (BBC, £25), by Delia Smith, is appetising enough to interest even a die-hard carnivore; Gary Rhodes Cookery Year (BBC, £18 99) will appeal to the inveterate dinner party host, and Rick Stein's Food Heroes (BBC, £20) imparts Stein's passion for both food and language. Look out too for Good Tempered Food (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), a delightful guide to leisurely cooking by Tamasin Day-Lewis (sister of Daniel).
It's also a productive year for Irish chefs. Dublin Dining (Black & White, £20), while sadly not Irish-published, is a gorgeous collection of recipes by Dublin's best chefs, from Kevin Thornton to Peter Caviston. The Avoca Café Cookbook 2 (Avoca, €24.99) is a second collection of recipes from the Irish shop chain, and a real humdinger of a cookbook. Domini Kemp has come to the rescue of the insecure cook with Real Food, Real Fast (Merlin, €16.99), while small screen hero Neven Maguire has produced a useful little manual in Neven Cooks (Poolbeg, €14.99).
Nascent Jamie Olivers will love It's a Yumee World (Blackwater Press, €12.99), a second cookbook from The Den's Aoileann Garavaglia, and armchair chefs will appreciate The Sopranos Family Cookbook (Hodder & Stoughton, £15.99), a compendium of recipes from the television series including Carmela's famous Baked Ziti. Finally, fans of the King can learn how to make that infamous fried peanut butter sandwich in Eating the Elvis Presley Way (Blake, £9.99).
International affairs/Bill McSweeney
It was the year when publishers forgot the Balkans and swung behind the cavalry in search of Taliban and Afghanistan, mullahs and madrasas. Bernard Lewis gave us a blunt and uncompromising account of the malaise of Islam, providing a scholarly corrective to the fashionable impulse to blame the West (What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.99). Fred Halliday's grasp of the Middle Eastern environment which nourishes Islamic radicalism makes him an invaluable source of readable and authoritative material on the main issues (Two Hours that Shook the World, Saqi, £12.95). And a revised edition of Ahmed Rashid's superb Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game has just been published (I.B. Tauris, £20).
Looking westward, journalist Will Hutton examined the myths and ideologies which legitimise the swing to the right in US politics today - a noxious blend of religious and political conservatism invented three decades ago, he claims - and which stand in contrast to the values and practices at the heart of the European Union (The World We're In, Little Brown, £12.99). Just the gift for Irish politicians dithering between Berlin and Boston. Visionary, intelligent, biased, brilliant. And while they ponder that choice they might also like to browse through Ireland in International Affairs, a collection of essays in honour of Professor Patrick Keatinge, favourably reviewed recently by Paul Gillespie (edited by Ben Tonra and Eilis Ward, Institute of Public Administration, €35)
Books on globalisation became an increasing and inevitable feature of the year gone by, the one that sparked the biggest debate being Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz (Penguin, £16.99). The Nobel prize winner, who was a World Bank chief economist in the 1990s, provoked a major debate about International Monetary Fund reform when his controversial book came out in mid-summer .
The Clinton years were recalled in The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton by Joe Klein (Doubleday, $22.95), and War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by David Halberstam (Bloomsbury, £20) and struck a cord in a year when many were wishing they could have Bill Clinton back. And for a sacrilegious look at the US right now there was Stupid White Men by Michael Moore (Penguin, £7.99).
Travel writers have their own take on international affairs, and the year saw the publication of Dervla Murphy's sad, moving account of the Balkans, Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys (John Murray, £20). Risking life on her bike, as usual, she pushed through inhospitable terrain to give us a taste of the region's fears, hopes, and hatreds. For Misha Glenny, reviewing the book, the risk was worth it; the result a fascinating rake through the ashes of war.
Nature/Michael Viney
Tree lovers are easy to please this year. Thomas Pakenham has done it again, lugging his tripod to mountains and deserts to photograph ancient bristle-cone pines and barrel-shaped baobabs among his chosen Remarkable Trees of the World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25). Nearer home, in Native Trees and Forests of Ireland (Gill & Macmillan, €29.99), photographer Mike O'Toole spent a year in the woods to catch their greeny-gold light and moist mystery. He illustrates David Hickie's inspirational account of their history and revival.
Fishermen fine and coarse will enjoy Bright Waters (Merle Unwin, £25), an anthology of rich, old-fashioned satisfaction drawn from the best Irish angling writers by the late Niall Fallon and Tom Fort. The Book of Eels (HarperCollins, £16.99 ) is Fort's own fascinating meditation on the life and changing times of this mysterious fish.
The year's biggest book, for the ecologist in your life, is the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (Oxford University Press, £99.50), with 910 pages but no pictures. For the ordinary wildflower-lover, Pat Smith's A Year in a Meadow (Strawberry Tree, €16.00) is a vivid diary in paintings and words of one wild patch of the Dingle Peninsula. Fine paintings and photographs are also part of Celebrating Boglands, a 20th-birthday publication from the Irish Peatland Conservation Council (from the IPCC, 119, Capel Street, Dublin 1, for €37 including p & p).
The new edition of The Complete Guide to Ireland's Birds (Gill & Macmillan, €24.99), by Eric Dempsey and Michael O'Clery brings a welcome, updated return of a book for the windowsill, not the pocket. And for the year's most engaging, personal and beautifully written book about birds, there's The Snow Geese, by William Fiennes (Picador, £14.99), a story at many levels that follows the geese to the Arctic.
Poetry/Gerald Dawe
The late George MacBeth, the Scottish-born poet and sometime Irish resident, was "an astoundingly prolific poet" and mentor at the BBC to many younger talents, as Carol Ann Duffy points out in her preface to his Selected Poems (Enitharmon Press, £8.95). Three volumes of selected poems also come to mind from a very different, younger generation of poets: Maura Dooley (Sound Barrier:Poems 1982-2002, Bloodaxe, £8.95); Sean O'Brien (Cousin Cat:Selected Poems 1976-2001, Picador, £7.99); and Gerard Smyth (Daytime Sleeper, Dedalus, €10.10/hb€17.70).
There was also this year Belfast-born Gearóid MacLochlainn's Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, €15), with translations by various poets including Ciaran Carson, Rita Kelly and Pearse Hutchinson - and a CD.
There was another posthumous volume from the excellent Michael Hartnett, A Book of Strays, edited by Peter Fallon (Gallery, €10/hb€17.50). Born in the same year as Hartnett (1941), Joe Sheerin published with Dolmen in the early 1980s a fine volume, A Crack in the Ice, and he now returns, almost 20 years on, with Elves in the Wainscotting (Carcanet, £6.95).
A favourite of mine, Anthony Hecht, one of the senior American poets, has published a real cracker in The Darkness and the Light (Random House, £9.62), while some of the younger kids on the block on this side of the pond have new books well worth a go, such as the impressive Justin Quinn's Fuselage (Gallery €10/hb€17.50) or John McAuliffe's first volume, the moving and deceptively astute A Better Life (Gallery €11.40/hb€17.50). Katie Donovan's Day of the Dead (Bloodaxe, £7.95) and the ascendant Dennis O'Driscoll's Exemplary Damages (Anvil, £7.95) also give a good idea of what is going on in the here and now.
Michael Longley's 20th Century Irish Poems (Faber, £9.99 ) is everything a good anthology should be: neat and uncomplicated. Fellow northern star Derek Mahon has just published his version of Birds (Gallery, €10/hb€17.50), by the French Nobel laureate, Saint-John Perse, while Medbh McGuckian's The Face of the Earth (Gallery, €10/hb €17.50) brings to eight her magical mysterious collections. As for that special gift, Adrian Rice and Angela Reid's A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art (Abbey Press, £14.99) is a wonder.
Wine/Mary Dowey
I've already stuck my neck out in the wine column to declare that Africa Uncorked - Travels in Extreme Wine Territory by John and Erica Platter (Kyle Cathie, £19.99) is the most entertaining wine book you'll come across this year. Intrepid journalists, the Platters brave cyclones, mosquitoes, leeches, political upheaval, bone-shaking dirt tracks and stomach-juddering food in order to visit vineyards in a dozen African countries. They defy hijack warnings to cross Mugabe's Zimbabwe; are granted armed escorts in Algeria. Why go to such extremes? Not for the wine (which, until South Africa is reached, tends to be grim), but for the winemakers - spirited enthusiasts in spite of dreadful odds. As colourful evidence of how deep the wine bug bites, this travelogue is hard to beat.
The most significant wine book of the year is The New France: A Complete Guide to Contemporary French Wine by Andrew Jefford (Mitchell Beazley, £30). Shaken by the runaway success of New World offerings, French winemakers are more questioning, more quality-minded, than ever before. Impressively researched and sensitively written, The New France charts the latest developments in each of the country's 14 wine regions, as well as boldly outlining continuing grounds for frustration. There's also an invaluable listing of key producers for each area.
If you need a stocking filler for a wine buff, The Wine Guide: The Best of Wine in Ireland 2003 (A&A Farmar, €12.99) may well be the answer. Now in its eighth edition, this popular wine buyers' annual has really hit its stride in the past year or two. Worthwhile additions for 2003 include a listing of 90 worthwhile wines under €12 and, goodness me, a section on premium beers!
For beginners or near-beginners who want to learn a bit more about wine without being bored, choose Sniff, Swirl & Slurp by Max Allen (Mitchell Beazley, £12.99). With an eyecatching layout and lively text, it makes the whole process fun - which is what it should be. Too many wine writers seem to forget that.
Crime /Michael Painter
James Lee Burke was in top form with his latest Dave Robicheaux novel, Jolie Blon's Bounce (Orion Trade , £10.99 ), as was Michael Connelly with his Chasing the Dime (Orion, £12.99). The other Connolly, our own John, gave us his usual mixture of horror and suspense in The White Road (Hodder, £14.99), while Pauline McLynn penned the third in her Leo Street series of comedy thrillers, Right on Time (Headline, £10.99).
In the more traditional line there is a new Chief Inspector Wexford work by Ruth Rendell, The Babes in the Wood (Hutchinson, £16.99); another in Minette Walters's series of psychological thrillers, Fox Evil (Macmillan, £12.99); and an Inspector Rebus novel by Ian Rankin, Resurrection Men (Orion, £17.99). If you're looking for something more out of the ordinary, then I suggest you try Martin Cruz Smith's Tokyo Station (Macmillan, £16.99), set in Asia during the first 40 years of the last century, or Henning Mankell's One Step Behind (Harvill, £16.99), a long, leisurely, though still suspenseful read set in Sweden, or John Lawton's Sweet Sunday (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about a New York private eye sweltering in the long hot summer of 1969.
Finally, I would like to mention a compendium by Peter Haining called The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (Prion, £17.99 ), which is a delight to delve into and a must for those most interested in the genre.
Gardening/Jane Powers
The Royal Horticultural Society is always a good provider of expert advice. Its revised and expanded Encyclopedia of Gardening (Dorling Kindersley, £35) is written by those who are masters in their fields. Everything from garden planning and maintenance to trapping earwigs and blanching chicory is covered in the 700-plus pages.
The encyclopedia's vegetable contributor, incidentally, is Joy Larkcom, who settled recently in Cork. Her indispensable guide, Grow your own Vegetables (Frances Lincoln, £9.99), is a chunky, densely-written paperback, packed with a lifetime's expertise. Anyone who ever hankers after a home-grown spud, cabbage or lettuce - or amaranthus, scorzonera or pak choi - will find the whole enchilada in Larkcom's pages.
The potted orchid has taken the place of the vase of lilies in many households. But how on earth does one care for these otherworldly looking plants? Introducing Orchids by Wilma and Brian Rittershausen (Quadrille, £14.99) supplies the answers. Orchid varieties are divided into "easy", "fairly easy" and "needs care" and the text is accompanied by larger-than-life portraits by Linda Burgess.
Finally, an entirely home-produced book is Gardening Tips from Dermot O'Neill and Friends (TownHouse, €12.99), a little compendium of garden advice from 26 of Ireland's top gardeners. From the three Ps of starting a new garden (planning, preparation and patience) to getting rid of slugs and vine weevils (keep a bantam or game bird!), there's an Irish solution here for every problem.
Rock & pop/Tony Clayton-Lea
Filter through the generally appallingkiss 'n' tell pop/rock autobiographies and biographies of 2002 (take a bow Catch A Fire, by Mel B, Headline, £17.99, and Kylie: Naked, by Jenny Stanley-Clarke and Nigel Goodall, Ebury Press, £14.99), and you will eventually come across quality material.
Two of the best include Shakey, by Jimmy McDonough (Jonathan Cape, £20) and Hardcore Troubadour, by Lauren St John (Fourth Estate, £18.99). The former tells of control-freak Neil Young's quite oppressive life and times; the latter the harsh, tempestuous, drug-addled story of country rebel Steve Earle. Staying with country music, the best left-of-centre book about Nashville's legacy is Roadkill On The Three-Chord Highway by Colin Escott, (Routledge, £13.99). Subtitled "Art & Trash in American Popular Music", its pen portraits of successes, losers and wannabes in the roughshod C&W wasteland make it a contender for genre book of the year.
Spanning over four decades of music from the north of England city that gave us everything from The Beatles to Atomic Kitten, Liverpool: Wondrous Place; Music from Cavern to Cream, by Paul Du Noyer (Virgin Books, £18.99), is a brilliantly researched and written piece of rock/pop history. As is This Is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco, by Garry Mulholland (Cassel, £17.99), a biased, opinionated and occasionally savagely humorous homage to the single - vinyl and CD version. It nominates Nirvana's Smell Likes Teen Spirit as the greatest rock'n'roll single in the book - which brings us neatly, and finally, to rock's biggest publication of 2002.
Journals, by Kurt Cobain (Viking, £20), is also, arguably, the most invasive rock book of the year. It is compulsive reading but you read with an overbearing sense of voyeurism. It's a book to be handled with sterilised gloves and read with guilt.
Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne
Upper Palaeolithic cave art has both astounded and perplexed experts. Why did humans go to considerable lengths to create complex images in deep, dark underground caverns? In a well-informed, persuasively argued book, The Mind in the Cave (Thames & Hudson £18.95), David Lewis-Williams combines anthropological detail with neurological and consciousness theory to offer a convincing account of "how we became human and in the process began to make art." The catalogue of Gerard Richter's currently touring, widely acclaimed retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting by Robert Storr (Museum of Modern Art, New York, £48), is a vivid testament to his acuity, resourcefulness and extraordinary influence. A stubborn, acerbic presence and a true artist of his time.
From a pioneering exhibition of Irish portraits in 1969 to the welcome appearance of Ireland's Painters 1600-1940 by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin (Yale, £40), no one has done more than this dynamic duo to restore to the light the lost or forgotten pages of Irish art history.
John Shinnors is a very popular artist, and this handsome publication, Paintings and Drawings (Limerick City Gallery, €35) produced for the gallery by Gandon, is a fully illustrated record of his largest and most successful exhibition to date. With texts by Paul O'Reilly and others.
Sean Sexton's photographic collection, as seen in The Irish: A Photohistory by Sexton and Christine Kinealy (Thames & Hudson, £24.95), was assembled over 30 years, is exceptional and makes for a riveting visual chronicle, admirably unsentimental and richly informative.
Nancy Wynne-Jones (Gandon Editions, €35) is a comprehensive, fully illustrated monograph on the work of the Welsh-born, Irish-based painter, associated with Cornwall and known for her sensitive approach to landscape. With texts by Brian Fallon, Hilary Pyle and the artist.
Bill Viola's RHA exhibition was one of the most popular shows of the year, and this re-issue of his collected writings from 1973 to 1994, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (Thames & Hudson, £16.95), provides an invaluable insight into the development of a major artist whose work combines advanced video technology and ancient mystical traditions.
The Oxford History of Byzantium, edited by Cyril Mango (Oxford University Press, £30) is an eye-opening, concise, copiously illustrated account of the emergence, flourishing and decline of a distinctive civilisation which links East and West and the ancient and modern worlds. Scholarly and accessible. Walking the Line by Richard Long (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is also recommended.
Irish Language/Pól Ó Muirí
Micheál Ó Conghaile seems to have been around for ever but is, in fact, just 40, young in writing terms. This year saw the publication of his novella, Seachrán Jeaic Sheáin Johnny (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, €10), a powerful piece which blurs the distinction between reality and imagination to such a degree that the reader must give all his attention to the text to realise fully its potential. The last three years that Ó Conghaile has spent as Writer-in-Residence at Queen's University, Belfast, and the University of Ulster have undoubtedly been productive.
Daithí Ó Muirí continues to build his reputation as a fine craftsman of the short story with his collection, Cogaí (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, €10). War, violence and betrayal are examined in prose that is lucid and confident while his subject matter is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
In contrast, Lorcán S. Ó Treasaigh's Céard é English? (Cois Life, €12) is a lyrical fusion of memoir and creative fiction which tells the story of growing up an Irish speaker in Dublin.
Another telling of a different kind is Colmán Ó Raghallaigh's An Tóraíocht (Cló Mhaigh Eo, €9), a graphic novel which retells the story of Diarmaid and Gráinne and is suitable for readers aged 12 and over. This is Ó Raghallaigh's second foray into this genre. His first, An Sclábhaí, won a Bisto Merit Award in May 2002. I suspect he'll be getting another one soon.
History & biography/Colman Cassidy
Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (Viking, £25) is a powerful testament to the need for Russian re-appraisal: some two million women, mainly German, but also Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish (from various countries) and even Russian slave labourers were repeatedly raped during the advance on Berlin. It is a tale of merciless revenge, with Stalin as ultimate arbiter.
The bicentenary of Robert Emmet's death will be commemorated in September 2003, and Robert Emmet: A Life (Gill & Macmillan, €29.99), by the TCD historian Patrick Geoghegan, is a timely contribution.
The biography genre was particularly vibrant in the memoir category. Blake Morrison's second compelling family memoir explores his relationship with his mother, Kim, a very private Irishwoman, in Things My Mother Never Told Me (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). Two towering figures associated with Irish theatre were also remembered in Denis Johnston: A Life by Bernard Adams (Lilliput, €32) and Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Toíbín (Lilliput, €15.99). Marguerite McDaid's Marguerite McDaid: Story of a Minister's Wife (Blackwater Press, €12.99), according to a survey conducted by Foinse, is outselling everything in Donegal. John Bowman and Eimer Philbin Bowman's, Jonathan Philbin Bowman: Memories, Reflections, Tributes (Howtatt Press, hb €29.99 and pb €14.99), is a vibrant celebration of a young life that ended too soon. And Mo Mowlam got it all down on paper in Momentum: The Struggle for Peace, Politics and People (Headline, £20).
The year saw complementary books on Primo Levi. Carole Angier's The Double Bond: Primo Levi - A Biography (Viking, £25 ), and Ian Thomson's Primo Levi (Hutchinson, £25), together achieve 1,522 pages on a unique life. T.J. Binyon gave us Pushkin (HarperCollins, £30), while, among other things, Wren's London was memorably evoked in Lisa Jardine's On a Grander Scale: The Life of Sir Christopher Wren (HarperCollins £25).
Sports/Emmet Malone
If ever a year in Irish football was going to produce a few books then this was it. The best are Roy Keane: The Autobiography (Penguin, £17.99) and Niall Quinn: Head First - The Autobiography (Headline, £17.99). The former, though something of a disappointment given the involvement of Eamon Dunphy, is a very readable account of the Corkman's career to date. Quinn's is a lighter and more revealing account of the rough and tumble of the English game compared to the tough and grumble approach of his former international team mate.
Head First, written with the assistance of our own Tom Humphries, was shortlisted for the prestigious William Hill sports book of the year award which was eventually won by Donald McRae's lively, well written and impressively researched account of the friendship between two of the greatest American athletes of the last century, In Black and White - The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis (Simon and Schuster, £18.99).
The list generally provides a good cross section of the year's best sports books and this year's three other runners up, Ellen MacArthur's Taking on the World (Michael Joseph, £17.99); Mike Atherton's Opening Up (Hodder, £18.99); and Tim Parks's A Season with Verona (Secker, £16.99) all proved exceptionally good reads.
Notable volumes of Irish interest are The Hurricane: The Turbulent Life and Times of Alex Higgins (Atlantic, £16.99); the beautiful and wonderfully produced look behind the scenes in Irish rugby, Putting it on the Line, by Inpho's team of photographers (Inpho Concepts, €40); and Dermot Gilleece's Breaking 80: The Life and Times of Joe Carr (Poolbeg, €29.95).
With the anticipated account of Armagh's remarkable triumph in the All Ireland still to hit the shelves, The Boylan Years, edited by Liam Hayes (Carr and Hayes, €25.99), is the most obvious gift for fans of gaelic games while McCoy: The Autobiography (Michael Joseph, £18.99) should prove interesting to anyone with even a passing interest in racing.
Science/Mic Moroney
It's been a hotch-potch year in popular science publishing, apart from one pricey, destabilising, 1,200-page tome, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram, £40), self-published by Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram claims to have bettered maths and statistics with his "cellular automata" - rudimentary algorithms which, over millions of computational steps, produce astonishing complexity and - argues Wolfram - also solve fundamental problems such as the origin of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, biological complexity and the limitations of maths. It sounds cracked, but scientists nervously reviewed a man whose first paper in particle physics was written at age 15.
Fun is the word for James Gleick's What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (Abacus, £12.99), essays on everything from the "thin ethics" of Microsoft to big-brotherish databases - prophetically overshadowing George W. Bush's new Total Information Awareness initiative. A more gobstruck tome on such issues has just arrived from old virtual realist, Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, $26).
The great pugilist-essayist Stephen Jay Gould, who died last May, left us with a fascinating final collection of essays, I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) - although the general reader should avoid his partisan and jargonistic doorstopper, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Harvard, €44.35). Gould's gentler opponent, Edward O. Wilson, is back with The Future of Life. Other best-sellers include John Barrow's The Constants of Nature (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), while Barrow's fellow-writer on cosmology, John Gribbin, has delivered himself of the daunting Science: A History 1534-2001 (Penguin, £25).
Science biography is perhaps best exemplified by James Hamilton's tale of Faraday (HarperCollins, £25), the 19th-century giant of electricity and magnetism, while the boy's club of science is punctured by Brenda Maddox's "post-feminist" biography of X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, £20).
Unfortunately, booksellers bury Irish sciencey titles in "Irish interest" sections, where the Royal Irish Academy's handy, potted-history reference, Irish Innovators in Science and Technology (RIA, €25), is rather humbled by Mary Mulvihill's impressive Ingenious Ireland (Townhouse, €30): an exhaustive, county-by-county lucky-bag of winsomely written essays on everything from geological treasures like the Burren to Ireland's oft-forgotten inventors, naturalists and scientists.
Popular fiction/Bernice Harrison
Maeve Binchy emerged from a very short retirement to write the wonderfully gossipy and easygoing Quentin's (Orion, £17.99) and immediately swept onto the bestseller list. In the book, Ella is making a fly on the wall documentary about the colourful characters that pass through the eponymous restaurant. Marian Keyes's Angels (Poolbeg €19.99) showed the writer in ever-stronger form with the well-constructed tale of Maggie Walsh and her escape to Los Angeles to get over her broken marriage. Keyes's take on Hollywood is laugh-out-loud funny.
A new India Knight book is guaranteed to be a light, funny read. Don't you want me? (HarperCollins, £7.69) can be a bit too London with its in-jokes and in places but its strength and attraction is Stella, the central character. The story of her quest to find a man among the perma-tan oldies and tight-trousered smoothies that she seems to attract like a loser-magnet is vivid and funny.
Cathy Kelly's new blockbuster, Just Between Us (HarperCollins, £17.38), tells the story of the four Miller women, mum Rose and her three daughters - gorgeous lawyer Stella, cool Tara with her career in TV and charming husband, and artistic Holly with her enviably laid-back life. All is not as it seems and the planning of their parents 40th wedding anniversary brings tension and bitter home truths to the surface as only a landmark family event can.
Patricia Scanlon made a welcome return to the shelves with Francesca's Party (Poolbeg €8.99), a predictable but well-told tale in which the heroine's life is turned upside down when she discovers her ideal husband's infidelity. There has been a revival in historical popular fiction and Rose Doyle's second novel in the genre, Fate and Tomorrow (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99), received a glowing review in this paper from Marion Keyes. It's 1902 and Nessa O'Grady's world is falling asunder as her family falls into poverty. Her only way out is to follow her new husband to the Congo, with all its misery and danger. Deftly written so that the well-researched historical background doesn't overpower, it can be read simply as a lively human story.
Travel/Conor Goodman
Michael Palin's Sahara (Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illustrated, £20) is based on a BBC TV series. The ex-Python's respectful, atmospheric prose makes this a rewarding read as well as a handsome picture book, if you can forgive the presence in every photo of Palin, virtually always wearing the same blue shirt and khaki trousers. For his companions' sake, I hope he washed them occasionally.
Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) is a beautiful meditation on tourism and modern life in general.
Mary Russell's Journeys of a Lifetime (Townhouse/Simon and Schuster, £6.99) binds together 20 years of travel writing, to form an interesting travelogue and autobiography of a remarkable Irish woman.
The Road to McCarthy (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99) is the sequel to Pete McCarthy's Irish odyssey, McCarthy's Bar. This time, he's travelling the world in search of McCarthys, with only slightly fewer of the whimsical observations that so delighted readers of his first book.
A quest with more purpose is Tim Severin's Seeking Robinson Crusoe (Macmillan, £18.99), in which the explorer traces the real-life roots of Daniel Defoe's hero. Journeying to Scotland, the Pacific and the Atlantic, he discovers three marooned islanders who could have provided the basis for Crusoe, and meets the descendants of Man Friday. A fascinating work of history and geography.
Film/Michael Dwyer
The screen hero of my teens was Steve McQueen, a natural actor who was the epitome of cool and oozed star quality. Seeing Bullitt several times shortly before I learned to drive encouraged me to do untold damage to the suspension of my first car, as I attempted to emulate McQueen's prowess at the wheel. The mystique permeating this fascinating enigma is cut through in Christopher Sandford's engrossing warts-and-all biography, McQueen (HarperCollins, £16.99), although many of the conversations it purports to quote verbatim are plainly dubious.
The mystique surrounding the craft of editing film is explored in an accessible and informative style by the Canadian novelist, Michael Ondaatje, in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Bloomsbury, £25), an imaginatively illustrated volume based on a series of discussions between the author and Murch, the gifted editor of Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the three Godfather movies, and the Oscar-winning film of Ondaatje's Booker-winning novel, The English Patient.
In The Quiet Man (Cork University Press, €10), Luke Gibbons takes a thoughtful, detailed and absorbing approach to the history, myths and resonances of John Ford's 1951 Irish classic, a film which, Gibbons notes, "has garnered accolades from directors as diverse as Spielberg and Scorsese, (while) for others it is the bane of Irish cinema". The Quiet Man is unfairly dismissed as "an entertainment for an IRA club night" by the eminent US-based, British critic David Thomson, in his indispensable The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Little, Brown, £25), updated and expanded in a recently published new edition. This collection of critical portraits of over 1,000 international actors and film-makers is articulate, shrewdly observed and highly opinionated. However much the reader may agree or disagree with Thomson's argumentative views, the book is essential reading.
Jazz/Ray Comiskey
One of the year's highest-profile publications, Deep in a Dream, by James Gavin (Chatto & Windus, £20), is an arresting account of trumpeter Chet Baker's sordid, selfish life and mysterious death; further scrutiny of the entrails is now redundant.
Two major figures, the late Gil Evans and the late Lester Young, who have received less than their biographically due attention in the past, also emerged from the literary shadows. Arranger and composer Evans, shy and retiring, and a musical alchemist of the front rank, is the subject of two significant biographies: Castles Made Of Sound, by Larry Hicock (Da Capo $25), and Out Of The Cool, by Stephanie Stein Crease (A Capella, €26.95).
Young gets what is probably the definitive treatment in Lester Leaps In, by Douglas Henry Daniels (Beacon, $30). It's a meticulously researched, exhaustive, if slightly academic account of the great tenor's life, but clearly a labour of love.
Another poet of oblique and shadowy beauty, Bill Evans, is looked at in Everything Happens To Me, by Keith Shadwick (Backbeat, $19.95). Subtitled "a musical biography", it's an impressive, if subjective, re-evaluation of the pianist's work, rather than a straight, chronological biog. Reference books are dominated by two of the finest: the sixth edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, edited by Richard Cook and Brian Morton (£22.50), is indispensable, while the three-volume second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld (Macmillan, £170) remains unequalled in its field.