The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks
Pieces of My Mind: Writings 1958-2002 Frank Kermode Penguin, £16.99
Frank Kermode sees the role of critic as "indispensable", for "art needs someone to speak for it and about it". However, he is trenchant when criticism is "produced on academic assembly lines . . . usually derivative, mechanical and hard to read". The work is presented chronologically, and is divided into Essays and Shorter Notices. These last are the more accessible, possibly because they were first written for the London Review of Books. So lucid is Kermode's prose that the Don DeLillo piece can be grasped in a single reading! While the longer essays are eclectic in subject, they have unity and in the end they all return to literature and art - even if it takes some time and many paragraphs to get there. The informal title belies the serious scholarship within, so be prepared to cope with fine arguments. In a word, concentrate! Kate Bateman
Elizabeth Costello J.M. Coetzee Vintage, £6.99
The reputation for great writing that won South African novelist J.M. Coetzee a Nobel Prize was built, perhaps unsurprisingly, on his skill for writing novels set in South Africa. Elizabeth Costello breaks out of this mould as a collection of eight "lessons" composed around the woeful speaking engagements of the eponymous character, an Australian one-hit literary wonder past her prime. Her wilder analogies make her something of an embarrassment to the academic establishments, not to mention the polite confusion that takes hold on the cruise liner where she is writer in residence. An odd creation, Costello serves as the mouthpiece for some of Coetzee's own musings. Her lectures are declared "food for thought", just as the reader reconsiders her construction and is forced to question the place of the writer in today's literary industry. Nora Mahony
The Shops India Knight Penguin, £6.99
This is India Knight's charming story of her shopping history over a lifetime, starting as a small, quite grand girl growing up in Brussels accompanying her glamorous, wealthy mother on a grocery shop. Maman, maman, on a oublié le caviare! cries young India at the checkout. Thus was a splendid shopping career born. Spliced into this shopping memoir are all sorts of weird and wonderful pointers for purchasing everything from books to read in bed to karaoke machines, from special gifts to give children to Pants of Steel. This book would be more useful if you lived in London, since a lot of the shops in The Shops are in that mighty capital. However, it's still a great read, and there are lots of excellent ideas and pointers to websites. Everyone will have their own favourite snippet in The Shops. Mine is the list of six infallible pillar-box red lipsticks - and I don't have to go to London to find them. Rosita Boland
Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia John Dickie Coronet Books, £8.99
From its humble beginnings in the citrus groves surrounding the Sicilian city of Palermo 150 years ago, the mafia has grown to become the best known brand name in organised crime. However, it's not until recently that a comprehensive history of this exclusive and brutal secret society could be written, and John Dickie has done just that. Cosa Nostra's inner workings could be uncovered only by talking to someone big on the inside, and they didn't come bigger than Tommaso Buscetta. When the former "boss of two worlds" began to sing it was like grand opera and made for fascinating, if uneasy, listening, not just for mafia bosses but for many politicians. Dickie's book reveals an Italian state that has shown, at the very least, an indifference to the mafia, and pays homage to the many brave officials who fought it and paid the ultimate price. Martin Noonan
The Roaring Nineties: Why we're paying the price for the greediest decade in history Joseph Stiglitz Penguin, £8.99
Nobel Laureate for economics, Joseph Stiglitz's CV reads like a one-man economics who's who, having chaired Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors before moving to the World Bank as chief economist and senior vice president. With this background he is ideally placed to take the reader behind the economic excesses of "the greediest decade in history" and describe the collapse of the bubble economy and the subsequent recession. Familiar names such as Enron, Tyco and Worldcom abound. Stiglitz postulates a view he calls "democratic idealism" - a combination of restrained economics and social responsibility with a steadfast confidence in the democratic process. Imagine! An economist who based his policies on empirical evidence rather than on partisanship! Mark McGrath
Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War Kate Adie Coronet Books, £7.99
Focusing for the most part on the experiences, lifestyles, sacrifices and heroism of women during the first and second World Wars, Adie details affectionately what it meant to be a landgirl, nurse, or Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent in the Allied cause, when it was initially perceived that a woman's place was far from the front lines. Adie draws on the exploits of real-life Charlotte Greys such as Odette Sansom and Viotelle Szabo, who both won the George Cross for bravery, and others who toiled in field hospitals, laboratories or factories, graduating as doctors, manufacturing munitions or darning socks for pilots. She documents how the press, society, military, politicians and diarists, then and now, viewed these heroines who contributed to the war effort when their menfolk laboured in training camps or on foreign battlefields. Paul O'Doherty