26 Books

Originally planned for release next year, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was brought forward after the Apple founder and former CEO died in October. Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times in the last years of his life and spoke to Jobs’s friends, former colleagues and to key figures at Apple. This kind of access to the man and his company is unprecendented, given that both are known for their secrecy.

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
Little, Brown 2011, Hardcover, 656 pages, £25.00

The result is a book that those with a casual interest in the technology world will find informative. However, technology experts, particularly those who follow Apple closely, will be disappointed. There are scattered technical errors and assertions by Isaacson that betray his lack of expertise but mostly the problem is that he hasn’t really uncovered enough that is new.

“Hey Foss,” the prosecutor said, taking Clark by the arm, “of course it changes. Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes everyday.”

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

George V. Higgins
Picador USA 2010, Paperback, 192 pages, £8.99

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is another classic of the hardboiled crime genre but while The Hunter is the equivalent of the Hollywood action thriller, this is the precursor to something more realistic, such as The Wire. The characters here, whether crooks, cops or lawyers, are just doing their jobs as best they can.

This is considered a classic of hardboiled crime fiction. It’s also the only book that I’ve continued to search for after I bought a copy. That’s because it took me a long time to realise that The Hunter and Point Blank, two much-recommended crime novels, were in fact the same book. There are also three film versions: Point Blank, Full Contact and Payback.

Point Blank (Parker 1)

Richard Stark
ALLISON & BUSBY 2008, Paperback, 288 pages, £6.99

Published in 1962, the book is the first in a series of more than 20 novels about Parker, a professional crook. Its author, Donald Westlake wrote more than 100 novels under many pseudonyms. The Parker novels were all written as Richard Stark. In summary, both the novel and its author go by many different names.

I don’t re-read books very often, as regular visitors to this site will know, but this is my second reading of Take Your Eye Off the Ball this year. Strictly speaking, it’s somewhere between a re-reading and a new book, since this Playbook Edition updates the original with more than 50 pages of new material.

Take Your Eye Off the Ball [With DVD]

Pat Kirwan
Triumph Books (IL) 2011, Spiral-bound, 288 pages, £15.94

The main changes are in updated examples from last season as well as new sections on this year’s NFL Draft and an added chapter on the special teams game.

Anna Funder’s first book, Stasiland, was a non-fiction work that explored life in East Germany during the Cold War. Her new book is a novel but one based very closely on real events.

All That I Am

Anna Funder
Viking 2011, Hardcover, 370 pages, £16.99

All That I Am tells the story a group of German activists during the 1930s as they try to warn the world of the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Just this week, TIME’s Aryn Baker referred to the US’s current entanglement in Afghanistan as “the unwinnable war” (cover article, under the unnecessarily leading headline Why the US will never save Afghanistan). After finishing Stephen Tanner’s very readable military history of the same, I have to agree with her summary: two and a half thousand years’ worth of history would indicate that indeed, no war between Afghanistan and a foreign belligerent is likely to end well for the overseas or overland invader (erm, sorry, ‘liberator’).

Those 2,500 years of history are wrapped up in Afghanistan: A military history from Alexander the Great to the war against the Taliban. Tanner’s book was one of my summer reads, and while it’s not exactly typical beach fare, it was as engrossing as anything else I’ve read this year.

Afghanistan

Stephen Tanner
Da Capo Press Inc 2009, Paperback, 392 pages, £10.99

This trilogy was recommended to me about 20 years ago. It’s taken me a while to get around to reading it, clearly. That’s a shame because all three books are excellent and reading them has made me keen to read more by Davies.

The Deptford Trilogy

Robertson Davies
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 832 pages, £15.99

Robertson Davies was one of Canada’s most distinguished authors and most of his novels were grouped in trilogies: the Salterton, Deptford and Cornish trilogies. He died before completing the third book in what his publisher speculates would have become the Toronto Trilogy.

Not long after the success of Thomas’s The End of Mr Y, PopCo appeared in the shops, complete with a similar looking cover. I assumed it was her next novel but in fact PopCo was published first.

PopCo

Scarlett Thomas
Canongate Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 464 pages, £8.99

That shows once you start to read it. PopCo is less sophisticated than Mr Y and Thomas either has trouble marshalling her material or has simply not yet developed a sense of how to balance a novel.

This is one of those books that could be considered to be a novel or as a series of interconnected short stories, in which certain characters drift from key roles into bit parts and back again. I lean slightly towards the former but I can imagine people making the case for it being a short story collection. It doesn’t matter all that much.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
Corsair 2011, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Most of the chapters are connected to Bennie, a record producer, or his assistant, Sasha, but there are some that centre on characters whose connection to the ongoing story is unclear, at least at first.

Published in 1999, An Unexpected Light is a remarkable piece of travel writing – it won the 2000 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award – and a very interesting memoir of two journeys through Afghanistan at different times in the country’s history. But more than anything it is a love story: a tribute to Jason Elliot’s desperate love for a place he will never truly belong to.

An Unexpected Light

Jason Elliot
Picador 2007, Paperback, 496 pages, £8.99