The latest releases reviewed
Looking Under Stones: Roots, Family and a Dingle Childhood. Joe O'Toole by The O'Brien Press, €14.95
Cutting perfect ice-cream wafers in his mother's shop, slaughtering and skinning a sheep and sizing up a customer with a few sweeps of a sharp eye - these are some of the skills the young Joseph O'Toole picked up in Dingle in the late 1950s and 1960s. It is Dingle before tourism found its footing, and where family and community (and the church) still reign supreme. O'Toole paints with wit and shrewd observation the town's transformation as he grows from boy to man, and sets his memories firmly in social and historical context. The book ends with his arrival in Dublin to go to teacher training college - long before he became Senator Joe O'Toole or made a name for himself in the trade union movement - and you can't help thinking that a second part of his life story should not be long waiting in the wings. Fionnuala Mulcahy
A Year at the Races by Jane Smiley. Faber and Faber, £8.99
If you like horses, then you will enjoy Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley's story about the year she spent as a trainer. If on the other hand, you know nothing about horses, and do not understand people's fascination with all matters equine, this book will doubtlessly confirm your suspicions. Firstly, there is the strange, quasi-sexual interest in the animal's physiques where Smiley's graceful prose suddenly throbs in its descriptions of musculature, length of leg, size and shape of eye, etc. Then there is much discussion of breeding and thoroughbreds, all faintly disconcerting and reminiscent of certain ideologies who hold eugenics close to their cold bosoms. Finally there are the quasi-mystical suggestions that somehow horses are in possession of a rare, almost telepathic kind of intelligence. This is weird stuff and really only for the initiated. Ken Walshe
By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel & Misadventure by Ed. Don George. Lonely Planet, £7.99
Central to all good travel stories are those off-the-wall moments that only happen when you exchange the routine for a rucksack, when you truly travel by the seat of your pants. This collection of tales, by writers as diverse as Jan Morris, Rolf Potts and Pico Iyer, is surely designed to get readers to drop everything, pick up a Lonely Planet guide and get wandering. But some of the escapades are considerably less amusing than what the average commuter encounters in a week. There's only so many ways to tell a good "stuck on a mountainside with only a threadbare sleeping bag and my wits" story.
Danny Wallace's experiences of seeing Prague with a gun-toting tour guide and and Amanda Jones's account of swapping New Zealand for San Francisco are among the highlights, but the quality is uneven. A lot like most round-the-world journeys, in fact. Davin O'Dwyer
Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife Ed. Henry-Louis de la Grange and Günther Weiss. Translated by Antony Beaumont. Faber and Faber, £10.99
Part of the fascination of this searingly interesting book is the conflicting emotions it evokes, not least the sheepish guilt at your own voyeurism. One of the famous artistic pairings of the turn of the 20th century, Gustav Mahler and his much younger wife, Alma (nee Schindler), were both flirts, but of course only Alma is remembered for her infidelities. With largely only Mahler's letters to study, the reader has to imagine the frustrations of a talented and sensual woman consigned (through her own choice and love) to a subservient role as muse, housekeeper and breeder for this brilliant composer. Mahler's passion for her, his need to keep her from developing her own talents, his ambition, his insecurities . . . these letters make habit-forming reading and leave you hungry for more. Christine Madden
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 3: 1955 -1991 by Norman Sherry Pimlico, £15
Though rather out of fashion now, Greene was a "big beast " of 20th-century English literature, with a prolific output once read by millions. Sherry, who has devoted three decades to an authorised biography of inappropriately biblical proportions, begins this final volume with a summary of the previous tomes, so it can be read as a stand-alone, but it still runs to some 900 pages with notes. There are detailed accounts of the globetrotting which inspired the novels. Despite an adulatory tone, the great voice of Catholic fiction is unwittingly and gradually defrocked by a lengthy exposé of his fall from grace: pathetic serial adultery; predictable tax exile in Antibes; petulant squabbling with Burgess; the pompous J'Accuse business in Nice; and the preposterous GPA literary award shenanigans in Dublin.Michael Parsons
Misfit: A Revolutionary Life by Capt Jack White Livewire Publications, €14.99
This book is a quirky, absorbing blend of autobiography, spiritual odyssey and history. Having won distinction in the British army in the Boer War, Capt White repudiated his Ulster ascendancy background and became a Protestant Home Ruler. During the 1913 Lockout, he helped Dublin workers rise from their knees by drilling the Irish Citizen Army. Jim Larkin did not like anyone stealing his thunder, however. White did just that by confronting 20 policemen with his shillelagh during an altercation outside Liberty Hall in Beresford Place. He faced down the peelers subsequently in court. His ultimate allegiance was to Christian anarchism in the Tolstoyan mould. The reappearance of this book, first published in 1930, is most welcome. Unfortunately, a follow-up account of White's adventures during the Spanish Civil War was lost after his death in 1946. Brendan Ó Cathaoir