Raising Girls by Steve Biddulph
01 Feb 2013 01:43:23
Fifteen years ago, according to Australian child psychologist Steve Biddulph, girls were "on the move, going places, focused and confident", while boys were "somehow all wrong". Raising Boys, the breezy, warm-hearted book he wrote to combat this "disaster area", sold millions and made him into an international parenting guru. Subtitled "Why boys are different", it claimed to challenge decades of fashionable consensus that the sexes were essentially the same, highlighting differences in brain dev... Read Full Story
Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories by Sherman Alexie
30 Jan 2013 00:39:36
The thing to forget straightaway, before approaching the work of Sherman Alexie, is anything you might have heard about him being an author who "just writes about Native Americans" that might have got you worrying about him being ominously narrow or specialist. Alexie grew up on an Indian reservation in Washington State and his short stories rage and pulsate with the centuries of injustice that have been visited on Indians – the word his characters prefer to use when referring to themselves – bu... Read Full Story
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
30 Jan 2013 00:36:37
Complex, time-consuming, expensive and usually inconclusive: it's hard to define what purpose psychoanalysis really serves. Janet Malcolm, one of few modern writers able to explain the Freudian method in clear, uncluttered prose, likened the process to pouring water into a sieve. "The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of the analysis," she wrote in 1983. Thirty years later, the medical reputation of psychoanalysis has deteriorated, even from that modest appraisal of... Read Full Story
The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth
30 Jan 2013 00:33:22
This is the third novel from 30-year-old Jenn Ashworth, who grew up a Latter-day Saint in Preston, and it takes place during a single day, with each family member taking it in turns to narrate. While the plot gets increasingly outlandish as it hurtles towards its climax, many of the book's best moments describe quiet, humdrum events. Gary's inner monologue as he patiently turns a conversation with a salesman towards God, trying to ignore his own stammer, is a juicy glimpse behind the bland facad... Read Full Story
Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn
25 Jan 2013 15:11:00
There are a number of things about Tracey Thorn's Bedsit Disco Queen that would be incongruous in any ordinary pop star autobiography. When her original band, the Marine Girls, was already relatively successful, she went to Hull University anyway and got a first in English. Her contemporaries used to call her "Popstar Trace". She's a thoughtful, trenchant feminist, and had reservations about the place of women in music that went far beyond "Shall I take off my top for Top of the Pops?" It is pla... Read Full Story
Return of a King William Dalrymple
25 Jan 2013 15:09:34
It is a history of the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, one of those passages of history the close examination of which requires a strong stomach – and which therefore also require the most thorough investigation. The seductive artistry of Dalrymple's narrative gift draws the reader into events that are sometimes almost unbearable, but his account is so perceptive and so warmly humane that one is never tempted to break away.
What happened during the invasion was largely determined by th... Read Full Story
You Are Awful by Tim Moore
25 Jan 2013 15:08:00
After a while, though, and as I hardened myself to the ghastliness of the surroundings, it became apparent that the book is far better than my first fears suggested. Mr Moore throws himself into his job, of travelling around the country's worst shitholes, with seriousness and dedication. He gets himself a satnav which speaks with the voice of Ozzy Osbourne (can such a thing really exist?). He installs it in an Austin Maestro, which he bought from a man called Craig. He plays, through its sound s... Read Full Story
Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop
23 Jan 2013 18:08:57
Cecilia is in her 60s, a cancer survivor living with a colostomy and an unhealed wound where the cancer was, where the radiotherapy did its drastic work. As one disconcerting sentence puts it, "She could not help wondering what had happened to her vagina." Even so she hasn't altogether ruled out the resumption of a sex life. Advertisers talk about the USP, the Unique Selling Point. This is a book with four powerful anti-SPs – mortality, disfigurement, "female troubles" and sex in later life. All... Read Full Story
Short review of all interesting crime stories
23 Jan 2013 18:07:56
Anyone who fancies a vigorous mental workout to complement their post-Christmas pound-shedding would be well advised to pick up a copy of The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner (Corsair, £7.99). What begins as a compelling but comparatively straightforward crime story set in Akron, Ohio – bestselling but bereaved author becomes curious about the mysterious death of a local recluse – takes a sharp left turn into the space-time continuum and infinite improbability takes over as events begin to... Read Full Story
Return of a King William Dalrymple
23 Jan 2013 18:06:38
It is a history of the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, one of those passages of history the close examination of which requires a strong stomach – and which therefore also require the most thorough investigation. The seductive artistry of Dalrymple's narrative gift draws the reader into events that are sometimes almost unbearable, but his account is so perceptive and so warmly humane that one is never tempted to break away.
What happened during the invasion was largely determined by th... Read Full Story
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne
21 Jan 2013 20:06:35
Jane Austen may be too likable or lovable for her own good. Pride and Prejudice, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, was recently elected the nation's favourite novel, and Austen herself, adorably but overlusciously impersonated by Anne Hathaway in a 2007 biopic, is in danger of becoming everyone's favourite maiden aunt – witty, wise and benign despite her emotional disappointments and the restrictions of her life. Her books, however, aren't frothy, frilly romcoms. With startling ... Read Full Story
Play It Again by Alan Rusbridger
21 Jan 2013 20:04:22
This is a journal of that year: part piano diary, part day-by-day breakdown of what a 21st-century editor actually does. The result is a unique melange of political and musical reportage, meditations on music-making deftly interwoven with reflections on the ever-changing newspaper industry. The frenetic pace of Rusbridger's working life contrasts starkly with the tortoise-like speed of his pianistic progress, documented through detailed, self-flagellating metronome marks. WikiLeaks kicks into to... Read Full Story
