The Ends of the Earth: a Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, by Robert D. Kaplan (Papermac, £10.00 in UK)
Robert D. Kaplan set himself a modest little task: to zoom around the world armed with backpack and notebook, isolate its most devastated spots, and make realistic predictions as how to how they may fare in the next century. Hah, you will say, it's just another travel book - and perhaps, in the end, it is. But Kaplan goes to extraordinary lengths to invert the usual cliches of travel writing, focussing in detail on what most travel writers would reject as drastically dull - airport hassles, border bribery, people's front rooms - and draws upon a vast array of international studies, from articles in The Atlantic Monthly, of which heis a contributing editor, to United Nations statistics via Andre Malraux, to back up his personal observations. The quotations give his prose a muscular, meaty quality, make essential reading of his bibliography - and occasionally save him from his own worst excesses, for, left to his own philosophical devices, he has a tendency to lose the run of himself, grading societies according to the acceptability of their public toilet facilities, for example, or interpreting the presence of hippies in a landscape as a sign of impending socio-political doom. But his main themes are sound, his central theses - that economic progress in the third world can't be (daren't be) separated from ecological factors, that population control is of crucial importance and that the concept of the nation-state as we know it is in its death-throes, to be replaced by fluid, ethnocultural trade zones in which central governments will play a minimal role - are strongly argued, and the vast scope of his book imposes a zig-zagging style of compressed sub-chapters which makes it almost hypnotically easy to read. Its strongest card, though, is that wealth of personal observation - and the sensual immediacy of his response to landscapes and cultures as disparate as those of Sierra Leone, Uzbekhistan and Cambodia. And his prognosis? Let's just say it isn't exactly full of good cheer - though he does find things to cheer about in unlikely places, whether it's flirtatious, chador-swathed women in Iranian teahouses, a truly Christian young admirer of Jimmy Swaggart in sub-Saharan Africa or a radical experiment in education and ecology in an isolated Indian valley.
Arminta Wallace
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, by Leo Tolstoy (OUP, £6.99 in UK)
The title story is fairly late Tolstoy and was written when the moralist in him was coming more and more to the forefront - a tendency which spoils most of his late fiction and ended up by making him abandon creative writing altogether. Told mainly through the eyes of a jealous husband, it has been interpreted in many ways and today is often viewed, fashionably, as an unconscious self-indictment of patriarchy and male possessiveness; yet the sexual tensions and rivalries it sets up, and the still-relevant questions it propounds, are often close to Strindberg and Ibsen. This volume also includes the early story "Family Happiness" and two later masterpieces, "The Cossacks" and "Hadji Murad".
B.F.
A Hurting Business, by Thomas Healy (Picador, £6.99 in UK)
Healy, a Scottish journalist and novelist, has been fascinated by boxers - particularly heavyweights - since childhood, when his father was a boxer in the booths. He had the usual fantasies about being world heavyweightchampion, though the nearest he got to it was the an occasional brawl - more often than not, in a Glasgow pub. Buthis knowledge and judgement of boxing is close and informed, he has followed all the champions from Marciano downwards,and his Top Ten is an interesting choice (He rates Ali very highly, but his No 1, like the plot of a film, shouldbe left for discovery by people who buy the book).
B.F.
Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O'Brien (New Island Books, £12.99)
This is a shortened version of a work which has already gone into paperback; whatever the merit of the individualabridgements (and I do not claim to have studied them in any detail) the book as a whole surely becomes moreaccessible. Burke, of course, is ultra-topical now, with his bicentenary upon us. In spite of his acknowledgedgreatness as an orator, his speeches had a way of emptying the House, while as a pragmatic politician he was relatively a failure. His writings and ideas, however, live on and in some ways are more relevant now than ever.
B.F.
Oscar Wilde: Complete Poetry, edited by Isobel Murray (OUP, £3.99 in UK)
There appears to be little consensus - if indeed there is any at all - on Wilde's importance as a poet. Yeatsput The Ballad of Reading Gaol into his Oxford Book, and more recently Seamus Heaney has championed it, but thepoem has terrible longueurs and insincerities and is usually cut or telescoped - as in fact it is here. OtherwiseWilde's verse smells of the Nineties and of French Aestheticism (that is to say, Parnassianism and Symbolism) atsecond hand. He had a good technique and a good enough ear, but an element of languid attitudinising keeps creepingin, while even his poems of socio-political indignation sound all too like Swinburne or Victor Hugo. He isprobably best in the poems of immediate visual and aural sensation, such as the series of short lyrics aptly titled Impressions.
B.F.
The Karnau Tapes, by Marcel Beyer (Secker & Warburg, £9.99 in UK)
Many novels are often described as "disturbing", but few actually disturb, when you get right down to it. Since I read The Karnau Tapes I've been waking up in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by a sense of dread: is it the novel, or the weather? Who knows? But there can be no doubt, surely, that this terrifyingly lucid portrait of the last days of the Third Reich is a powerful and, yes, disturbing work. The story is told, from brilliantly offbeatangles, by two first-person narrators - Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer who is engaged in an obsessive project to record every sound the human voice is capable of making, and Helga, the eldest of the six children of Hitler's leading propagandist - the outcome is inevitable, and stunningly sad, and without ever losing its narrative immediacy The Karnau Tapes becomes a meditation on guilt, innocence, normality and madness.
A.W.