A roundup of this week's paperbacks
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
Dennis O’Driscoll
Faber, £9.99
In all but name, Stepping Stonesnow stands as the official Heaney autobiography. While the structure is a schematic framework of interviews that progress through the Nobel Laureate's career and achievements, the thread of these conversations amounts to a full tapestry linking childhood, youth, marriage, the writing life, relationships with fellow writers and artists – in fact the whole lived experience of family man, teacher and poet. While the tone is guarded, the verbal generosity of Heaney's poetry, and the attentiveness which has characterised it for over 40 years, is here replicated in the responses to Dennis O'Driscoll's questions. The range and depth of those questions allows Heaney to delve anew into his own poetry and excavate from memory with such vivid recall that the reader closes this remarkable book with a sense of having viewed the subject from all angles. The pre-eminent value of Stepping Stonesis, of course, the insights it provides on those aspects of the poet's life that have yielded some of the greatest poetry of our age. Gerard Smyth
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Harper Press, £9.99
Usually assumed to be in opposition to one another, Richard Holmes argues that scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were fired by the same sense of wonder and "imaginative intensity" as the Romantic poets. To make his case, he describes in vivid detail the most remarkable adventures undertaken to advance human knowledge, during the period. The book begins with the fascinating story of Joseph Banks, an aristocratic botanist who travelled to the South Sea Islands with Captain Cook in 1769, to collect botanical and zoological specimens. However, his natural curiosity and openness to native communities soon found him branching out into ethnology and anthropology. When Banks returned to Europe, his On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islandsrocked people's understanding of civilization. Holmes goes on to recount the scientific adventures of those inspired by Banks's example. His consummate storytelling is matched throughout by an attention to technical details. Nicholas Hamilton
The Death of the Critic
Rónán McDonald
Continuum, £8.99
The professional critic as an arbiter of artistic value "seems to have gone the way of the rag-and-bone man and the bus conductor, no longer a figure for which a late capitalist society has much use," laments McDonald. "If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its connection with a wider public," he argues, and his main focus is on this loss and its roots in the history of literary criticism. We get a very useful overview of literary criticism from Plato to postmodernism. McDonald sees it as having become too confined to academics from the late 20th century and he calls for a reverse of that trend. He also blames the rise of cultural studies for giving political judgements greater importance than aesthetic concerns. He has no easy solution but does suggest ways in which a "new aestheticism" could be developed in university English departments and also detects hopeful signs, such as the increase in creative-writing programmes. Brian Maye
Origins: A Memoir
Amin Maalouf. Trans. by Catherine Temerson
Picador, £8.99
Maalouf's memoir begins with a trunk the author drags from his grandmother's house in the mountains of Lebanon to Paris, where he has lived since Lebanon's civil war began in 1975. The trunk contains thousands of pages of deeds, photographs, and letters written and organised by his grandfather, Botros. Maalouf attempts to understand his grandfather and his great uncle, Gebrayel, as individuals in the larger world, through the letters the brothers wrote to one another. His grandfather, an orator and poet remained at home during the fall of the Ottoman empire, while the charismatic Gebrayel emigrated to Cuba in 1895. Originsis not an exercise in self-discovery but rather a journalistic exercise in exposing the diversity of even a single family. Emily Firetog
Positively Yours
Amanda Hearty
Transworld Ireland, £10.99
Positively Yoursis all about making babies – but only the dull bits of the process. Erin spends her days obsessing about not being able to become pregnant and pushes her marriage to breaking point before conceiving after a boozy Hen night. Beth's surprise pregnancy heralds the end of her sex-based relationship with her boss, but single motherhood is no longer the taboo it once was sohappily it won't affect her high-powered career. Grace gladly left Ireland for perennially sunny San Diego, but upon discovering her pregnancy decides she wants to raise her child in Dublin. Her American husband is allowed a suitably short period of objection before acceding to her wishes. This novel is full of emotionally blundering partners, Irish Mammies mammying grown children, lazy brothers, and the presumption that motherhood is the holy grail of womanhood. An extended rhapsody on the joys and terrors of pregnancy, it is about as engaging as checking Junior for nappy rash. Claire Looby