This weeks selection of Paperbacks
Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
Gore Vidal
Yale, £8.99
This appraisal of the work and character of the first three American presidents clearly has one disdainful eye on what is being done to their legacy by the current regime. Unusually for Vidal, his polemical edge is blunted here by his taste for political minutiae, and his stylistic sparkle is less evident too. But, as ever, the historical setting is vividly recreated, and the leading players in America's era of revolution and consolidation are gossiped about as familiarly as if Vidal had founded the nation with them. What impresses him ultimately is their consistency of purpose: despite their personal contradictions and the opposing forces they represented, his protagonists together imagined and brought into being a new kind of republic. Each was far- sighted enough to see the potential for tyranny and corruption in the state they had created - and this is obviously where Vidal thinks we're at now.
Giles Newington
The Murdoch Archipelago
Bruce Page
Pocket Books, £9.99
Page's pedigree as an investigative journalist is impeccable - he led The Sunday Times team that outed Kim Philby as a KGB spy, Robert Maxwell as a crook and exposed the drug thalidomide as unsafe. He has the perfect credentials to take on the challenge, and is the last person the chief executive of News Corporation would want as his biographer. A big fish in a small pond in his native Australia, Rupert Murdoch became a world player with the acquisition in 1969 of the Sun and the News of the World, and later the Times and the Sunday Times. His media empire is now worth £30 billion and rising. He is one of the most powerful men in the world. But how did he manage it? Is he a poisonous media monster? A power junkie whose fix is the deal? Page leaves us in no doubt. And, as with all good horror stories, you'll rest less easily after reading this powerful book.
Martin Noonan
Goya
Robert Hughes
Vintage, £12.99
Spain has produced the world's two best-known pacifist paintings. Picasso stunned the mid-20th century with his depiction of Guernica's bombardment, yet his compatriot, Goya's, close-up of a firing squad, The Third of May 1808, remains freshly shocking after almost 200 years. Goya is most famous for his graphic images of war but he also created a series of images which have come to virtually symbolise his homeland: bullfighting, the Inquisition and scorching portraits of haughty grandees. His best work is in Madrid's Prado but the National Gallery in Dublin has four pictures. Australian Robert Hughes is one of the world's best art critics and has the rare ability to infectiously enthuse a wide audience. Although it is narrower in scope than some of his previous work there is unlikely to be a better account of this painter's life, times and prodigious output.
Michael Parsons
The Mystery of Things
A.C. Grayling
Phoenix Books, £7.99
"The best life is the life informed and considered" quotes Grayling in the introduction to this inspired collection of essays. True to Socrates's words, he invites us to consider such diverse and loaded topics as 'Shakespeare's Genius', 'The City in Modern Culture', 'Machiavelli', 'The Origins of the Universe' and even 'Alien Abductions', seeking to draw our attention to the many mysteries, solved and unsolved, and ceaselessly debated, which lie at the heart of human history and contemporary society. In covering the fields of art, history and science, Grayling's thoughts sweep over a vast landscape of knowledge, offering an alluring glimpse and encouraging greater study on the reader's part. How refreshing, ultimately, in this age of dumbing down, to be asked to learn and inform oneself without a hint of condescension.
Tom Cooney
The Americas: The History of a Hemisphere
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Orion Books, £6.99
In this concise examination of the American continents, noted historian Fernández-Armesto argues that despite a history of complex interrelationships, the concept of a pan- American hemisphere is generally ignored due to the rise of super states in America and Canada. He contends that from early man through modern times the destinies of North and South America were tightly bound and that it was not until European penetration, colonialism and the rise of the United States as a political and economic superpower that the continents of the American hemisphere began to be perceived as separate. In his controversial conclusion, the author claims the future may see the reversal of fortunes between North and South. While erudite in his contentions, and brisk with his thesis, at times the author's tone reaches pedantry and his eventual conclusions regarding the dubious ascent of the United States as a superpower come across as biased.
Will Sullivan
Irish Voices at Glyndebourne
Gus Smith
Atlantic Publishers, €13.50
With impressive thoroughness, this book documents Irish successes over the years at Glyndebourne Festival and its offshoot, Glyndebourne Touring Opera. The most recent of these - and perhaps the most triumphant, given that it followed a harrowing personal tragedy - was Orla Boylan's starring role in Jenufa this summer. Smith chucks anecdotes, observations, gossip - Cara O'Sullivan on Anish Kapoor's infamous "vagina" set design for Idomeneo - and the occasional delightfully bitchy review into the mix. "I'd be mad too, if I was squeezed into an ill-fitting powder pink two-piece which looked suspiciously like polyester," wrote the Norwich Evening News of one particularly abject operatic outfit. Opera. Don't you just love it?
Arminta Wallace