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
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