The latest releases reviewed
Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist Nikolai Tolstoy Arrow, £8.99
"They f**k you up, your Mum and Dad . . ." , only Patrick O'Brian's mother died when he was three, the youngest of nine, and so it was his "evil-tempered, powerful, domineering and ferocious domestic bully" of a father who so neglected his son that, like Shakespeare's Richard III, Patrick was "sent into this world scarce half made-up". Nikolai Tolstoy was O'Brian's stepson through O'Brian's marriage to Mary Tolstoy, and he has written an exhaustive if exhausting tale of the great novelist's early years. As the world discovered just a few years before the secretive O'Brian's death in 2000, his claims to Irish birth, experiences under sail and so on were all figments of his fertile imagination. But the man who gave the world 20 volumes of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and the Surprises was a genius. Andy Barclay
Diane Arbus: A Biography Patricia Bosworth Vintage, £8.99
Diane Arbus's photographic portraits of dwarfs, transvestites and freaks shocked audiences when they were first exhibited in the 1960s. During the course of one New York show, staff were forced to come early each day to wipe off the spit on her photographs the public reaction was so violent. Bosworth's absorbing biography reveals an artist trying to see beyond the "surface distortion" of these individuals and to evoke "the secret experiences that lie within all of us".
The book traces the elusive figure behind these iconic images from her privileged New York childhood - which she claimed left her immune to reality - to her revolt against the plastic world of commercial fashion photography and her eventual suicide in 1971.Bosworth captures how the eerie ambiguity that hangs over so many of the photographs reflects Arbus herself. Eoin Burke-Kennedy
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia Åsne Seierstad Virago, £7.99
Seierstad first followed the characters whose stories make up this book in the spring of 2000. Six months later, half a million Serbs protested outside parliament, leading to the ousting of President Slobodan Milosevic. Seierstad revisited her subjects. Following the assasination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, and amid rising nationalism, she made a third trip last year. Individually, each chapter is a dispassionate portrait of the real life of a refugee, a prime minister, a farmer, a priest, and 10 others. The effects of years of war are poignantly portrayed: couples without hope of steady work or advancement, the war criminal's wife who works nights to send her children to school. But taken as a whole, the book indicates the negativity, denial of guilt and stasis of Serbian society. Having chosen her title five years ago, Seierstad regretfully concludes it remains apt. Ralph Benson
Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism PJ O'Rourke Picador, £7.99
American foreign policy, Kosovo, Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and anti-god-damn-everything demonstrations, all get an O'Rourke-style short, back and sides in this tidy pamphletic crew-cut. Well written, sarky and sadly too succinct, the narrative makes its way from one war zone to the next, finishing off inexplicably at Iowa Jima, dissecting the views of Nobel laureates, military personal and an Israeli taxi-man, among others.
While an at times humorous and intelligent right-wing gloat from the American side of the Republican river, this is as much the discarded wedge from the baker's palette-knife drawing together a fly's graveyard of slim-line crusts into a justifiable commodity as the repackaging of 10 stale articles for a few bucks. For O'Rourke fans only. Paul O'Doherty
The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions Randall Sullivan Time Warner Books, £9.99
Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin tend to occur in remote rural locations such as Knock, Lourdes, Garabandal or, in a case which attracted the attention of American journalist Randall Sullivan, the trailer-park home of Mexican immigrants in Oregon. Sullivan investigates these "miracles" and especially the events which began in a small town in Bosnia-
Herzegovina on June 24th, 1981, resulting in the establishment of an important Marian shrine at Medjugorje. This account of the visions allegedly witnessed by Balkan peasant children, and how the civil and religious authorities reacted, sheds light on why thousands of Irish pilgrims have flocked there. The author's spiritual re-awakening is chronicled but the vivid descriptions of heaven, hell and purgatory may be of greater interest . Michael Parsons
Walter Sickert: A Life Matthew Sturgis Harper Perennial, £12.99
Walter Richard Sickert was "intelligent, worldly, shrewd and witty" in the words of a fellow artist. And that's precisely what this thumping great biography is. And what a life Sturgis chronicles with fluency, authority, and a hugely impressive framework of research. Sickert's abiding passions were drawing and painting, with his "creed of the real" in his choice of subjects, his language, and his teaching, all served up with a spice of exaggeration and delivered with mercurial brilliance. Pupil of Whistler and friend of Degas, Sickert found inspiration in the music halls of Victorian/Edwardian London and Paris. It was all something new, and likely to shock. Sickert loved to shock, but did he like to kill? Sturgis gives the Sickert-as-Jack-the-Ripper theories short shrift. This biography is well worthy of an iconoclastic, mercurial and vastly entertaining maverick. Andy Barclay