PAPERBACKS

This week's paperbacks reviewed

This week's paperbacks reviewed

Photofile
Magnum Photos
Thames Hudson, £8.95
Photofile is a paperback, pocket-sized book of images by Magnum photographers, spanning 74 years (1932 to 2006). The introduction, by Fred Ritchin, tells of the foundation and early days of the organisation. Henri Cartier Bresson, founder, explains that in the begining, photographers were adventurers with ethics; members were encouraged to transcend the artificial life and evoke the situation of truth in their work. Robert Capa saw a future in a combination of mini cameras and maxi minds. Life's reality is recorded with respect and dignity. Opposite each image there is a biography of the photographer. A flick through the book shows 48 duotones and 24 colour pictures and the images pop out again and again, fresh to the viewer. The series won the first annual prize for distingushed photo books at the International Centre, New York. Four new books in the series are due in the autumn and will feature Peter Beard, Robert Capa, Saul Leiter and Duane Michals. Cyril Byrne

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
Penguin, £8.99
No Logo author Naomi Klein's latest book is nothing less than a one-volume Truth Commission on neoliberal economics. Klein relates how the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, along with his "Chicago School" disciples, debauched the intellectual and moral currency of their profession by inflicting upon country after country a sociopathic programme of "planned misery" - all in the name of the "free" market. She also draws up a pretty damning rap sheet against Bono's guru, Jeffrey Sachs, for his role in administering "shock therapy" to Bolivia, Poland and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Klein's apparent unawareness that Karl Marx spotted the "disaster logic" of capitalism a long, long time ago will cause some on the left to twitch, while no self-respecting laissez-faire devotee will fail to chuckle at her bleeding-heart assumption that the collateral agonies of the poor - and their children - actually, well, matter. Daragh Downes

The Secret of Lost Things
Sheridan Hay
Harper Perennial, £7.99
The reader is quickly in thrall to the narrative voice of Rosemary, who is delighted to be in the grown-up world of work in a large Manhattan bookshop, an emporium frequented by collectors willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a rare book or first edition. Rosemary's role includes shelving and clearing the teeming aisles as well as escorting wealthy, manic collectors to the cash point. She quickly comes to know the eccentrics among the staff. However, as the complexities of plot expand so do the yards of overwriting laced with complicated references to canonical authors. The mystery about a missing Melville manuscript is a cliché and the novel is over-larded with literary devices and tropes. It's a pity, as this is a potentially charming coming-of-age tale of a young Tasmanian girl who, after her mother dies, is encouraged to think she will succeed and is given a ticket to New York. Kate Bateman

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Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope
Horatio Clare
John Murray, £8.99
In this stunningly written memoir of a drug-fuelled youth misspent, Horatio Clare subverts the cliché that "anti-drugs" parables have to be preachy or condescending. Expelled from secondary school for smoking dope, Clare's addictive tendencies kick-start a series of alcohol and drug-inspired misadventures, as his behaviour becomes increasingly manic and reckless. His arrest one night after stealing a milk float and crashing it into a hedge, while hilarious, blurs the line between comedy and tragedy. Highs of drug-induced bliss inevitably precede a downward spiral into crippling depression. Rather than trumpeting his crazier misdemeanours, Clare's narration is full of philosophical insight into regret, self-loathing and remorse, and his writing reveals the lyrical soul of a poet trapped in the body of a drug-addled lunatic. Truant holds a mirror up to our society of excess, forcing us to take a sobering look at our own attitudes toward "soft" drugs. Kevin Cronin

Young Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix, £9.99
This is such entertaining history, told in such a racy, pacy style, that one might forget it relates to one of the worst monsters of 20th-century history. To employ literary comparisons, this Stalin seems like a mixture of Falstaff, Fagin, Jekyll and Hyde; in other words, an amiable rogue with multipersonalities. We certainly get a more rounded picture of the early Stalin than we have got before. The voracious lover and the talented poet aspects are new, others show the child was father to the man; ominously, he was obsessed with betrayal by the time he was training for the priesthood. As his comrades caroused, the maturing Stalin could be found on the floor at a party reading Napoleon's memoirs and taking note of the mistakes. In his role of bank robber for the party, he was already casual with the lives of others, able to control people because they wanted to follow "the young man with the burning eyes". From this account, it is hard not to admire - however grudgingly - the emerging despot. Brian Maye