Richard Gillison the best 2007 rugby work, from Trevor Brennan's award-winning effort to an analysis of the game post-amateurism.

There is a difference between Trevor Brennan's Heart and Soul(Red Rock Press, priced €16.99) written with Irish TimesRugby Correspondent Gerry Thornley and the winner of this year's William Hill Irish Sportsbook of the Year, and some of the other rugby biogs on the market this Christmas. It is to do with vanity, or the lack of it.

This is an honest account of what it's like to be a professional rugby player. There is no artifice, no attempt to create a media friendly "brand", no snide slagging off of former colleagues and coaches in the rush for sales.

This takes us closer to the story of Brennan's life through its remarkable ups and downs. The end result is a portrait that offers a more complex, interesting insight than the one-dimensional hard man of Leixlip caricature.

The early, formative years at Barnhall club are dealt with quickly, but referenced throughout as Brennan's career landmarks come thick and fast.

The emotion of the first cap, the European Cup wins and, of course, the life ban - every page is a treasure trove of anecdotes, most of them told against himself. Before signing for Toulouse, he was given lunch with the players and coaching staff. He ordered the only thing he recognised, steak, which came very rare. Unable to eat it, he put it in his pocket and threw it away in the toilet.

The move to Toulouse tripled his salary and took his life and that of his family in a different direction, one which seems to have enriched them in a way that goes beyond the rugby field.

The prologue tells of his life now, serving his ban for fighting with a member of the crowd during an Ulster match. Brennan is a guest at a Toulouse match, but for a man who has been at the centre of the action his whole rugby life, the sense of isolation makes it one of the saddest passages in any sports book you'll read.

It is a tribute to Brennan and Thornley that, given this context, there is not a shred of self-pity in the book.

But there is a sense of regret all the same over how it has ended. Towards the end, there is a revealing exchange between the player and his coach, the much-respected Guy Noves, his mentor at Toulouse.

"What was it like to play in a game where you didn't get involved in any controversy or fights or didn't get a yellow card?" asks Noves after a European Cup win against Leicester, in which Brennan had dealt well with the threat of Martin Johnson.

"Fantastic," was Brennan's reply.

Rucking and Rolling, by Peter Bills (Mercier Press, priced €25), is a coffee table book charting the last 60 years of the international game. There is some analysis of each decade, supplemented by the views of many of the top players of each era. But the real enjoyment is in the photography, which tells the story of rugby's evolution from the skinny, wild-haired amateurs through to today's muscle-bound gladiators.

There is a compelling brutality to some of the pictures, particularly those of the Lions tours to South Africa and New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s - you wouldn't want to mess with Kiwi legend Colin Meads, for example. Flicking through Bills' book makes a refreshing change to many of the one-dimensional autobiographies on the market. There is little that will add to the aficionado's knowledge of the game, but it makes for a pleasant book to pick up and browse.

The author takes a romantic view of the game's amateur past, and suggests that changes brought on by professionalism have eroded the game's true spirit, homogenising what he calls the "extraordinary potpourri of human intellect and character" which defined the game.

Flicking through this book, it is hard to disagree.

From There to Here: Irish Rugby in the Professional Era, by Brendan Fanning (Gill & Macmillan, priced €12.99): "A leisure activity played on a voluntary basis" was the IRFU's description of rugby at a press conference held just before the Ireland team headed off to compete in the 1995 World Cup in South Africa. When they got there they found the game had moved on. The home team was being paid £20,000 a game by a local sponsor, when the Irish players were collecting £1,200 in expenses for the whole trip. A year later the professional era began officially, at the historic IRB meeting in Paris.

"It's gone," said Syd Millar as he exited the committee room. He was referring to rugby's amateur status, but could have been talking about a whole way of life. The speed with which things moved caught the IRFU, the players and the coaching staff cold.

What Brendan Fanning makes clear throughout his excellent book is that professionalism is about a lot more than being paid.

"The rugby ruined the holiday," was how outhalf Eric Elwood describes the 1994 Australia tour, and some of the most entertaining passages recall the dog days of amateurism, when drinking and the craic vied for importance with results on the pitch.

However, it is the institutional amateurism within the IRFU that was arguably more damaging to Ireland's progress on the field through the 1990s. The unhappy marriage of Brian Ashton and Pa Whelan sums up the divide between the old and new. "Pat's Irish; I'm English. Pat's an amateur; I'm professional," said Brian Ashton at a press conference designed to present a united front.

The years of back-biting and double-dealing provide Fanning with some nice tales, but defeat to Argentina in the 1999 World Cup was seen as a turning point by several IRFU members - things could not get worse than that night in Lens.

Fanning concludes that although the journey From There to Herehas reaped on-field success, there is more to be done. The domestic structure he calls "hard to fathom" and wants to see greater independence for "franchises".

After Ireland's disastrous World Cup campaign, Fanning is sure to be lining up a follow-up.

Lawrence Dallaglio began his England career on the bench against South Africa, and probably his last, the World Cup final, in the same place.

These games bookend a memorable career, that could have soared higher still were it not for a News of the World sting that led to him being stripped of the England captaincy in favour of Martin Johnson.

And the tone of his book, It's in the Blood: My Life, (Headline, priced €24.99), bears the stamp of someone bearing their soul. The passages describing how he dealt with the tragic death of his sister, who died in the Marchioness disaster on the Thames, are particularly moving.

Much has been made of his criticism of Brian Ashton during the recent World Cup, the serialisation of which will have pushed Dallaglio's book on to many Christmas lists. But it could have been Eddie O'Sullivan in the firing line had Dallaglio, whose mother is from Co Cork, accepted an offer to play for Ireland in 1994 from Noel Murphy.

"How would you like to wear the green of Ireland," said Whelan in a phone call to the player's home, "We hear you like a few pints of the black stuff." Whelan played on the man's then lack of international recognition.

"I would hate to see you wearing a white jersey on the bench for England when you could be wearing a green jersey on the pitch for Ireland."