26 Books

Ron Jaworski was an NFL quarterback for more than 15 years. He spent the bulk of his career with the Philadelphia Eagles and took them to their first Super Bowl. These days he is an analyst on Monday Night Football.

The Games That Changed the Game

Ron Jaworski
ESPN Books 2011, Paperback, 312 pages, £10.22

In this book, Jaworski looks at seven NFL games that he believes represent important moments in the tactical development of the sport. He gives the background to the coaches and players involved and then examines the film of the game to explain how the tactical innovation in question played out.

This is one of those books that feels like a good, long magazine article that has been expanded beyond the range of the material. Other examples include The Long Tail, Freakonomics and anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, Gladwell is probably the apotheosis of the form: his books feel like over-extended articles; his articles feel like over-extended anectdotes.

Super Crunchers

Ian Ayres
John Murray 2008, Paperback, 272 pages, £9.99

Ayres at least has an interesting story to tell. The rise in the practice of analysing large data sets is changing the way many areas of our lives work, from finance to medicine, shopping to wine criticism. These changes are profound and although they will help us to make better decisions, they will also make a lot of people uncomfortable, not least those who consider themselves experts.

Richard Brautigan was, at various times in his life, poet in residence at MIT, homeless, a best-selling novelist, a compulsory patient at a hospital for the insane and suicidally depressed.

Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

Richard Brautigan
Delacorte Pr 1969, Paperback, £1.60

He found fame writing prose – particularly his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America – but he wrote poems first, and his habit of handing out cheaply-reproduced anthologies on the streets of San Francisco is a neat, although somewhat lazy and banal, image with which to brand him as the voice of the hippies.

Yet more detective fiction, this time in the guise of espionage and the Secret Service.

Diamonds are Forever

Ian Fleming
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London to be cut, and they’re sent off to America to be sold.

Whoosh, away from Italy, north to Sweden and another detective, Kurt Wallander.

The White Lioness (Inspector Wallander Mysteries)

Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

The crime story here is more ambitious and international in scope, involving an assassination plot of famous real-life South African political figures, fictional contract killers and the landcapes of two radically different countries.

Another Italian detective, but this one’s home grown. Salvo Montalbano is a Sicilian police inspector and this is his first appearance in print.

The Shape of Water (Montalbano 1)

Andrea Camilleri
Picador 2005, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

The story concerns a man found dead in a car in a wasteground well known as a trading place for prostitutes and drug dealers. He’s Silvio Luparello, an engineer and uncorrupted politician. He’s wealthy and aristocratic, so the well-worn crime trope – this case must be finished quickly to avoid publicity for the powerful friends of those in charge of the police – comes into play and Montalbano feels under pressure.

Modern crime fiction doesn’t go in for humanity all that much. There are faults, for sure, but fondness and family bonds that aren’t late ripped apart from a threat from an avenging psychopath are rare.

A Venetian Reckoning

Donna Leon
Pan Books 1996, Mass Market Paperback, 240 pages, £6.99

Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, a sort of Venetian Maigret with a lower clear-up rate.

The only Le Carre books I had read, before this one, were his classics from the 60s and 70s: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and the Smiley Trilogy. This is a more recent work, which deals with the espionage world as it today, with the Cold War a distant memory and terrorism the new threat.

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carré
Sceptre 2009, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

When Issa Karpov, a young Chechen with links to Islamist terrorists, arrives in Hamburg, he immediately draws the interest of the intelligence services. The Germans are keen to erase memories their failure to detect the Hamburg-based group that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US. They want better intelligence sources to help spot future plots.

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.