Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
A Secret History of the IRA Ed Moloney Penguin, £8.99
This book is not a comprehensive history of the republican army, rather it is an attempt to lay bare those internal republican power struggles which have been largely hidden from us, in the period from 1970 to the Belfast Agreement. In this narrower perspective, the story of the IRA is seen through the story of Gerry Adams, of those who allied themselves with him in war process and peace process, and of those who opposed him. For Moloney, Adams is a perfect prince of duplicity, who, seeing the impossibility of victory, bounced his organisation into an absence of war to a great degree against its will or even without it quite realising what was happening. The analysis is persuasive, and if he is right about Adams most of us, I suppose, are grateful; but why were 3,500 deaths necessary for republicanism to recognise the right of the Northern majority to self-determination? - Enda O'Doherty
I Don't Know How She Does It Allison Pearson Vintage £6.99
If, on holidays, you spot a mother of small children nodding wearily and often, laughing a lot, and having a weep at least once as she reads a lurid, pink-covered paperback, chances are it's Alison Pearson's superb tragi-comic tale. It starts with the heroine, Kate Reddy, very late at night blearily bashing shop-bought mince pies so they'll appear home- made when she presents them at her daughter's Christmas fair. She's been hard at work all day as a fund manager in the aggressively male world of the City but she still feels she has to appear to be the perfect mother and homemaker. With two children, a very nice husband, hilariously sniffy in-laws and an extortionately expensive nanny, she's just about keeping all the balls the air. Then there's a transatlantic flirtation that might just take her mind off it all. A real treat, especially for thirtysomething working mothers. - Bernice Harrison
Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent Mary Laven Penguin, £7.99
Hassled women - and that's most of us, really - will take cheer from this account of 16th-century Venice, when umpteen women with no vocation were lured, tricked or pushed into becoming nuns. The result was intriguing tensions. Nuns were supposed to share everything, yet hoarded wine in their cells and feuded over chickens. They were supposed to be poor and unworldly, but invested in property, trade and loans, and influenced secular politics. Above all, nuns were supposed to be chaste brides of Christ, yet were prone to silly love affairs. Determined that Christ would be no cuckold, Church authorities tried to sever nuns from the world, physically and emotionally. Yet one corrupt priest, Giovanni Pietro Lion, turned a convent of 400 into his harem. Mary Laven's book is learned, easy to read, and makes the 21st century seem heavenly. - Mary Feely
The Invasion Handbook Tom Paulin Faber £7.99
This volume of poems and prose pieces on the path from Versailles to the Battle of Britain is the first in a projected series of three books on the second World War funded by a £75,000 grant from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. It is a tough and indeed curious assignment, but one which Paulin has attacked with considerable ambition and flair. Approaching the theme through a series of voices of historical characters - Clemenceau, Stresemann, Briand, Churchill, Joyce, Eliot and others - the work embraces both the cultural and political/diplomatic spheres and for that reason may perhaps fall between two audiences. Nevertheless at its best, as in the long poem 'Battle of Britain', it is very good; at its worst, as in 'The Former Yugoslavia', a quick bolt into the near-contemporary, it is Paulin on his soapbox again, righteous, preachy, flat and boring. - Enda O'Doherty
Paris France: Personal Recollections Gertrude Stein Peter Owen Modern Classics, £9.95
During the inter-war years in Paris all sorts of geniuses, real and peculiar, came to dance at the cosmopolitan crossroads of the Rive Gauche. Gertrude Stein's salon was one in which many of these - Fitzgerald (F. Scott), Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, Debussy, and others - paid court. This book, first published on the day Paris fell to the Nazis, captures Stein's unique voice. Though at first this seems the incoherent rambling of a precious old dame too far gone in dotage for her editor to interfere, you soon find yourself submitting to her sometimes exquisite play on language and ideas. Rambling riffs playfully link matters of great or little consequence, such as foreigners, potatoes, logic, fashion and tradition. These themes are repeated, becoming a chorus for her sweeping generalisations and parables of knowing whimsy and wisdom, forming a tide that sweeps you, unresisting, along. - John Moran
July, July Tim O'Brien Flamingo, £7.99
Several American obsessions turn up repeatedly in its literature and film; two of them are the 1960s and class reunions. O'Brien blends both into his latest novel, a witty and successful examination of human foibles and how these - not our perfections - make people sympathetic and loveable: love, loss and coping with both lie at the heart of this book. After finishing university in 1969, this group of friends splintered into different lives and fates - all suffered to some degree, all have altered their ideals in the euphoria of the 1960s in order to cope with the flow of life. In the mirror of each other, the characters encounter again their youthful, hopeful selves; the July weekend of the title becomes a chance for personal growth and new alliances. O'Brien skilfully combines the present with what has led to it to create a book of depth and dimension - and of great humour. - Christine Madden