If the 21st century has a characteristic and defining emotion, it is probably fear. Living in a world where international terrorism, catastrophic climate change and the nuclear threat make daily headlines, people (unsurprisingly) are afraid. Yet, as Bourke’s imaginative history shows, the anxieties that plague us today have their origins in those that afflicted our parents and our grandparents. Using a wide range of statistical, anecdotal and biographical evidence, she has written a book that traces the genesis and history of our fears throughout the 20th century. It has its inevitable lacunae (why so little on scary movies or our attempts to tame our fears by turning them into fiction?) but this is an impressively original and thought-provoking survey.
(Virago £9.99) NR
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THE FINAL SOLUTION
by Michael Chabon
In Chabon’s wartime novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, comic strips were the author’s cultural touchstone; here, it is Victorian detective stories. The ensuing plot recounts the last hurrah of an ageing, Conan Doyle-like sleuth who comes out of retirement to solve the mystery of a stolen parrot belonging to a young mute Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. Add to this fanciful equation the geriatric detective’s ebbing powers, the fact that the missing bird has a habit of squawking out cryptic numbers in German, and an act of murder most foul, and the solution is far from elementary. Chabon’s prose is as polished as one might expect from such a gifted literary magpie, but he has written a divertingly featherweight novel largely clipped of ambition.
(Harper Perennial £6.99) TL
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ALL OF THESE PEOPLE
A Memoir by Fergal Keane
This compelling and entertaining memoir by the BBC’s former war reporter, now a special correspondent for the corporation, is dominated by two addictions: first, the alcoholism of his successful Irish-actor father, which overshadowed his childhood in Dublin and Cork — Keane himself became dependent on alcohol and movingly describes his recovery in the book; and, second, his addiction to war reporting. He developed a taste for it when he experienced the “nerve-wracking but exhilarating” sectarian street violence in Belfast, and went on to witness township bloodshed in South Africa, the appalling genocide in Rwanda and the wars in Kosovo and Iraq. He has now decided to confront this particular obsession, and has announced he will no longer report from war zones.
(Harper Perennial £7.99) SB
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THE WHOLE EQUATION
A History of Hollywood by David Thomson
As a film critic, Thomson’s sometimes fanciful judgments can be infuriating, but his knowledge is never in doubt, and this highly idiosyncratic account of the rise and fall of America’s dream factory never bores. Loosely chronological, it is a densely packed yet quite random mixture of hypotheses, anecdotes, facts and figures, interspersed with his own particular cinematic preoccupations. The picture of Hollywood that emerges is vividly three-dimensional, yet one shot through with the kind of rueful cynicism found in the film Chinatown, a movie that recurs as a motif throughout the book. Thomson’s dismissal of contemporary sensation-seeking (“I have nothing to say about Star Wars”) will get many nods of agreement from story-starved movie fans.
(Abacus £9.99) PW
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COAL: A Human History
by Barbara Freese
In the 1920s, 1m men in Britain worked as coal miners, one sixteenth of the nation’s workforce. Today there are fewer than 5,000 miners, and the central importance of coal to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the modern world is in danger of being forgotten. Freese’s fascinating account of King Coal’s place in the western world’s industrial expansion reminds us of its historical significance and the lengths to which we went in order to mine it.
Her final chapters, outlining the role of coal in the economic transformation of China, demonstrate how much the future of the planet, threatened by environmental damage and global warming, still depends on our ambivalent relationship with the fossil fuel.
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(Arrow £7.99) NR
URSULA, UNDER
by Ingrid Hill
This ambitious novel tells how Ursula Wong, aged two, falls down a disused mineshaft while on holiday in Michigan with her parents. Her father, Justin, of Chinese-American descent, and mother Annie, of Finnish stock, organise a rescue operation. Then the reader is given six novella-length episodes that may or may not have a bearing on Ursula’s genealogy. These range from the story of a 2nd-century Chinese alchemist to one about a 17th-century Italian Jesuit. The result is exotic but unconvincing. Suspension of disbelief is further impeded by the novel being told by an omniscient narrator who constantly tells the reader things the book’s characters cannot know.
(Vintage £6.99) SB
VINDICATION: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Lyndall Gordon
“I am going to be the first of a new genus,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her sister Everina in 1787, and Gordon’s expansive biography certainly endorses her subject’s claim. A radical, rationalist and revolutionary, Wollstonecraft combined faith in both reason and emotion in her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She proposed changes in law, education and behaviour, and condemned female complicity as well as male dominance. Such demanding originality found its detractors; Horace Walpole saw her not as a new genus, but as a monstrous species, “a hyena in petticoats”. Gordon is particularly enlightening on Wollstonecraft’s life and personality, writing a vindication of her perceived inconsistency and pride and presenting her as “a pioneer of character” as much as of women’s rights.
(Virago £9.99) ES-B