The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks
Roscoe William Kennedy Scribner, £7.99
The latest addition to Kennedy's Albany Cycle is a headspin into the dark core of American politics, transporting the reader vividly, compellingly, to the Democrat battle for dominance in 1940s Albany. In a world of brothels and backhanders, cock-
fighting and canvassing, war heroics and private failures, Roscoe is desperate to retire from the party, but powerless to resist its draw; though his heart collapses, he pushes on, for there are ghosts and secrets to be wrestled with. The gargantuan cast of characters perhaps befits the story of a complex, protracted political life, but it can grow arduous meeting one more crooked brewer, one more suborned cop. Still, the main players are drawn full and rich, and Kennedy sounds perfectly the ache of tension, the throb of bitterness, and the deep vein of black comedy at the heart of the political machine. - Belinda McKeon
The Lunar Men: the Friends Who Made the Future Jenny Uglow Faber and Faber, £9.99
Don't be mislead! The lunar men of the title are not from the world of sci-fi. They were a group who met in each other's homes to engage in what Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the great Charles, called "a little philosophical laughing". They met on the Monday nearest the full moon so they would have light to ride home by - practical men. The core group were: Matthew Boulton, head of the first "manufactory"; James Watt of steam engine fame; Josiah Wedgwood of the beautiful blue jasper ware; and the philosopher chemist, Joseph Priestly. Few had formal university education and most were Non-conformists, so they were free to think, to imagine, to experiment, to create and to initiate. In Uglow's book the excitement of inquiry so spills over that the reader becomes as full of wonder as the biographer herself. - Kate Bateman
Reviewery Christopher Ricks Penguin, £9.99
Mea culpa if this is news to you, but there's great pleasure to be had from the reading of book reviews, as well as from the works with which they are concerned, particularly if the reviewer is as eloquent, as incisive, and as utterly engaged with his subject as is Christopher Ricks in every one of the 50 reviews which make up this rewarding collection. Sometimes Ricks adores what he is reading, as with the letters of Henry James; sometimes he has quibbles, as with Robert Martin's biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins. But at all times, he is the writer's dream - meticulous, respectful, alert to every detail, and absorbed in both the content and the context of a piece of writing, from plot to page design. Dip into his reviews of figures from Hemingway to Heaney, Steiner to Sartre, Behan to the Beatles, and discover how his fluid style and his scrupulous standards render him a reader's dream also. - Belinda McKeon
The Victorians A.N. Wilson Arrow Books, £9.99
Delving under the bonnet of the Victorian era, A.N. Wilson comes up with dazzling stories involving everyone from Peel to Asquith, Tennyson to Wilde and on to the faintly absurd figure of the Queen herself. He links them together, with verve and clarity, as a people with a talent for continuity, who derived their immense power from a mix of ingenuity, luck and bloody-minded self-belief. But he also understands intuitively the obscure terrors that lurked beneath the studiedly placid exteriors of a society undermined by doubt, misgiving and dread. Ultimately it is no weakness that the author remains unsure whether they were a restless, bloody people who "gained the whole world" but "lost their honour and their soul", or whether the "comparative stability, strength and benignity" of Britain in the half-century after Victoria's death was their true legacy. - Fergal Quinn
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer Penguin, £6.99
This lavishly praised winner of last year's Guardian First Book Award is a work of unmistakable virtuosity which fails to live up to its sparkling beginning. The first of its two co-narrators, Alex, is a Ukrainian travel guide whose thesaurus-aided struggles with the English language (to stay up late, in Alex-speak, is to "remain conscious very tardy") give the early part of the novel a comic freshness that proves difficult to sustain. The mood darkens with the arrival of the second narrator from the US, Jonathan Safran Foer himself, a young Jewish writer who is working on a magical realist history of his ancestral village, and wants Alex's help in finding out what happened to his forebears at the hands of the Nazis. But the two voices never quite harmonise, nor does the comedy sit easily with the terrible historical events, while Foer's presence in the novel feels vaguely manipulative.- Giles Newington
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place Janet Browne Pimlico, £12.99
This is volume two of Browne's monumental biography of the great Victorian scientist (volume one is also now available in paperback). Comfortable in a conservative, affluent society, Darwin hesitated to put his revolutionary ideas on natural selection forward. On the Origin of Species (1859) dominated the second half of his life. Browne points out that although Darwin's theories may have been frightening to mid-Victorian readers, the style of his Origin "was thoroughly sympathetic and genial, creating a distinctive magic between author and reader". He avoided talking about God or the origins of humans in an (unsuccessful) effort to avoid controversy. Browne superbly sites her subject in his historical setting and the clarity and ease with which she explains even the most complicated of scientific questions make this book a really rewarding read. - Brian Maye