An Island in Time: The Biography of a Village
Geert Mak
Vintage, £8.99
The Frisian village of Jorwert, in the Netherlands, is used here as an example of the radical alteration of rural life over the past century. Jorwert was transformed from "a community founded on mutual need to a miniature consumer society" through such influences as state quotas for the production of milk and manure, the mechanisation of farming and the growth of car ownership and supermarket shopping. Mak, who grew up in Friesland, has written more than just a sociological study, and the book's subtitle is apt, as the author balances statistics with closely focused portraits of the individuals whose circumstances have so fundamentally changed through the influence of technology, bureaucracy and globalisation. While the writing is not slick or stylish, there is a charm to the suitably pastoral clumsiness of phrases such as "more and more holes appeared in the dyke of loyalty and tradition, and suddenly the village economy was washed away", and Mak's closeness to his subject makes this a moving account. Colm Farren
The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story
Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber, £9.99
Okay, hands up. Who can count as part of their family a KGB agent who organised the assassination of Trotsky, the world's biggest fur trader, who was under FBI surveillance and who had connections with the USSR, and a rich and secretive psychoanalyst with links not only to Sigmund Freud but also to the abduction of a Russian general? Chances are that Mary-Kay Wilmers is one of the few. The three men in question – Leonid, Motty and Max – may sound like characters from a Nabokov novel, but they are, in fact, part of the Eitingon family history. Not surprisingly for a family with links to the KGB and abductions, it's a slippery and complicated tale, but Wilmers's prose is clear and concise throughout, ensuring that the reader rarely loses the thread in one of the most fascinating family histories you are ever likely to read. Ian McCourt
The Blue Moment
Richard Williams
Faber, £9.99
Few jazz artists have inspired more books, and few albums more discussion, than Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. Richard Williams, chief sportswriter for the Guardian and a man with an admirable CV in music and arts journalism, here traces the album's trajectory and its subsequent influence on other forms of 20th-century music. This is an eminently readable book in the best sense; those without a knowledge of musical notation or jazz have little to fear. There are piles of anecdotes that keep the narrative ripping along, and if Williams is selective with his stories, it makes this book trip along like So What. Williams regards Kind of Blue as something of a Rosetta stone from which nearly every other music genre has developed, but his hero worship never overpowers what is a deserved homage to a beautiful work of art. One omission, though, was a little hard to take. Williams writes in detail of the outstanding studio Kind of Blue was recorded in, a former Armenian church on 30th Street in New York. He could have broken the news gently at some stage that it was demolished around 1984. Laurence Mackin
That Old Cape Magic
Richard Russo
Vintage, £7.99
"Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming," writes Richard Russo at the end of this novel. In this lies the humour of life for Griffin, a once-successful screenwriter with a talent for seeing only too late how a situation in fiction or in life might pan out. Whether it's his eavesdropping on a couple at a bar, his relationship with the best friend he can't seem to shake or a neighbourhood kid reappearing in time for his daughter's much-anticipated wedding, there's an odd inevitability to Griffin's life. Naturally enough, he's losing his lifelong battle not to turn into his parents. That Old Cape Magic is a wry look at family life and an exploration of exactly how well we all know our loved ones, on some level or other, even if we come to understand them only long after it counts. Nora Mahony
Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe’s Discovery of the East
John Man
Bantam, £8.99
Marco Polo and his written account of his extraordinary travels are famous, but "both man and book are like will-o'-the-wisps, and the closer you look, the wispier they get". Polo tells us hardly anything about himself or his experiences on his mid-13th-century journey from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, in China. He does, however, tell us a lot about the society he saw there, although his record "is so riddled with inconsistencies and distortions" that some scholars have suggested it was a fabrication. Not so, retorts Man, and in this book he follows in Polo's footsteps to Xanadu (the site of Kublai's summer palace, or "stately pleasure dome"), and Beijing and back again, locating traces of the journey left behind with the help of expert archaeologist Wei Jian. Man is a gifted storyteller, with a fine eye for detail and skill at anecdote, but we have to keep in mind that his conclusions are speculative, some more so than others. Brian Maye
