26 Books

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

These two books make up the other half of the Library of America volume collecting Roth’s work between 1986 and 1991. While The Counterlife and Deception explored the boundary between fiction and fact from one side, these two books approach from the opposite direction.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 767 pages, £30.00

The Facts is Roth’s autobiography and, despite its title, it’s prefaced by a letter from the author to his character Nathan Zuckerman, asking for feedback. ‘The Facts’? Yeah, nice try Roth.

Last year, I read four Philip Roth novels – the first of his Zuckerman series, anthologised by The Library of America as Zuckerman Bound. This year I read the next Library of America volume, which collects the four books Roth wrote between 1986 and 1991.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 767 pages, £30.00

Two are works of fiction that Roth dares us to view as autobiographical and two are non-fiction but Roth teases us with the possibility that he is not telling the truth. I’m going to look at the first two in this post.

I read this back in May and in the time it’s taken me to write about it the football season has rolled around again. Wilson’s book is a thorough guide to the history of tactics in football, from the days when the majority of players were attackers, through to the modern game, in which teams frequently play without a recognised striker.

Inverting the Pyramid

Jonathan Wilson
Orion 2009, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

Though Wilson, as an English writer, spends a lot of time on the game at home, he also finds time for extensive examinations of how the game developed across Europe and South America.

This was Wallace’s first collection of essays. It’s not quite as good as the follow-up, Consider the Lobster, but it does contain some brilliant pieces, particularly the title essay.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace
Abacus 1998, Paperback, 368 pages, £9.99

There are seven essays here, all published between 1992 and 1996 and covering literature, television, film, tennis and, of course, Wallace’s now well-known social observation.

Tokyo Vice first skulked across my radar last summer when Jake Adelstein spoke at the Frontline Club. I had tickets to the event but at the last minute, circumstances intervened and I missed out. It was a crying shame: this is the kind of memoir that, lively and engaging in book format, would verily crackle in the hands – and words – of the author himself.

Tokyo Vice

Jake Adelstein
Scribe 2010, Paperback, £35.00

Adelstein’s account of his twelve-year career as a journalist on the police beat in Tokyo is an accessible, pleasing read.  That’s no back-handed way of saying the storytelling in Tokyo Vice is simplistic (it is clearly told but not dumbed down) or set out in a primitive parade of monosyllabic grunt-words (Adelstein is a skilled writer with a perfectly ample vocabulary – and in two languages at that). Rather, it’s a memoir that just unfolds itself from the outset, and for this reader, as for the half-dozen people I have recommended it to, it was difficult not to get carried along in the momentum of Adelstein’s crazy life.

Beginning with African talking drums, this book takes us on a tour of the history of information. It’s not just about the history of transferring information between people or places, it’s about the concept of information itself.

The Information

James Gleick
Fourth Estate 2011, Hardcover, 544 pages, £25.00

Gleick is a science writer who, in 1987, wrote the first mainstream book about chaos theory. I haven’t read that but I would recommend Faster, his 1999 book about the technology-driven speeding up of everyday life.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death, so there could be no more appropriate time to review Bruno Walter’s highly personal book about his friend and mentor.

I found it in a beautifully preserved first edition on a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye and read it in no time at all. It’s a very slim volume, packed with personal reminiscences and the musical isights of one of the 20th century’s finest conductors on perhaps (we have no way of knowing today) its finest.

It’s an odd book, this. Smeeth’s grandmother was a young girl working in the kitchens of a big house shortly before the first world war with ambitions to be a cook.

Edwardian Entertaining

Christine Smeeth
FCA Cooperative Resources Centre Ltd 1989, Paperback, 112 pages, £3.99

To achieve her aim, she wrote down all the recipes she could persuade the house’s cook to tell her, making a record of Edwardian home cuisine for the wealthy. Her granddaughter, Smeeth, converted these notes into recipes that a modern cook might understand, drew some illustrations and published.

I was fascinated by the idea of UFOs as a child. As I got older and realised that it was highly unlikely that aliens were visiting us my curiosity dimmed. But even if alien spacecraft are not dropping by, the UFO phenomenon does exist. There are lots of people – many of them reliable and respectable – who are seeing something, so what is going on?

Mirage Men

Mark Pilkington
Constable 2010, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Mostly it’s people mis-identifying planes, planets or other man-made lights in the sky. Mark Pilkington’s book suggests that the US has exploited UFO ’sightings’ as a cover for its own secret projects. While concrete proof is hard to come by, the evidence he provides is pretty compelling.