Peter Costello
This has been a strange and difficult year for publishers, large and small. As religious and spiritual books come largely from small firms, they have been hit very hard.
With lockdown across their main markets closing bookshops, online purchases, click-and-collect, and special localised deliveries have been the trend.
So sales do go on, but many firms have held back books for next year, hoping that proper launches, publicity interviews, and open sales will then again be possible. Everyone welcomes the advent of vaccines.
Here we present a selection of books for Christmas, books of all kinds, bearing in mind that what may people feel the need of at this season is warm human interest narratives and positive stories.
A Promised Land
by Barack Obama (Viking, £35.00)
The book of the moment is certainly the second part of President Obama’s continuing memoir. It has garnered many appreciative reviews, and how could it not, given that the settled, civilised, humane tone of the book is in strange contrast to the lewd, hectoring bluster that has infected the White House for the last four years. This is a book that will be read and re-read in years to come, a solid reminder for all parties of the civilised standards that the United States aspires to, but at times falls short of. The world may have welcomed Mr Obama, but in the United States for some to see an African American sworn in as president, and with his family installed in the White House, was enough to enrage those who think in terms of white rule for ever lording over all other cultures and faiths. Mr Obama sustains the idea that there is a better way. That his memoir sold some 1.7 million copies in its first week suggests that many Americans think so too.
The Education of an Idealist
by Samantha Power (William Collins, £21.00)
An Irish-American who working first as a journalist, then as a political activist with President Obama, rising to Ambassador to the United Nations, was plagued by personal and medical problems. A moving account of one woman’s life that reveals a great deal about the ways of the world and the people who live in it. Given her background, Irish readers may take more from it than many.
A Light that Never Goes Out: a Memoir
by Keelin Shanley (Gill Books, €21.99)
Written over the last months of her life, this is the remarkable testimony of the well-known journalist and television personality, whose presentation of the early evening news made her a face in every home in Ireland. This account of her life and her fortitude makes for emotive reading, but without a moment of self-pity: she lived life to the full to the last moment. A book once read which will never be forgotten, its vivacity and appetite for life makes this a joyful book, in its endorsement of what can be achieved while facing cancer treatment, which is in its own determined way an encouragement to all.
The Thursday Murder Club
by Richard Osman (Penguin Viking, €16.99)
Mr Osman’s smartness outshone Alexander Armstrong’s jokiness on Countdown. And why not, as he had created and produced the show. When a television personality turns to writing humorous crime the literary critic cringes. But this agreeable off-take of the interwar golden age detective tale (the title recalling directly Agatha Christie’s 1932 Thirteen Problems). This is the sort of relaxing read one needs at Christmas, though the conclusion is perhaps more clouded than the ‘Duchess of Death’ herself would have created. The first of a series, which will doubtless end up on the telly as well.
A Literary Christmas
(British Library Publishing, £12.99)
Here are 152 pages packed with literary gems from many great names – from Dickens to Wodehouse – that encompasses all the flavours of Christmas in times past. Such miscellanies were a regular seasonal offering in the old days, and this book is an agreeable revival which would have pleased many of the authors included. Charming and varied, and just right for a wide range of readers.
And while the reader is on the British Library site, they might like to look at the other tempting offers of reprints and new titles the British Library has on offer, wonderful treasures, forgotten or half-forgotten, from the past which may attract you.
Great Moments in Irish Football
by the staff Sportsfile (O’Brien Press, €24.99)
This has not been a good year for sports and sports fans. So to cheer up the soccer-playing females, the GAA-mad dads, the aspiring rugby stars, and other family members with their particular loves, is a compendium of past sports glories in words and pictures.
Looking Back
by Eric Luke (O’Brien Press, €24.99)
From the archive of Eric Luke of The Irish Times, a record of some 40 years of constantly changing, yet oddly unchanging, Ireland. The images are often stark, but they also glow with a certain warm sympathy for places and people. Perhaps a book to remind the family members down under in the summer warmth of Australia and New Zealand of what they left, and perhaps why, in a year when they are told not to come home to see the mammy.
The Homekeeper’s Diary 2021
by Francis Brennan (Gill Books, €24.99)
The Covid-19 crisis has given the title of this book an ironical overtone as nearly all of us – in some way or other – are keeping more to the home than we were. Here the ebullient and ever-anecdotal Francis Brennan suggests how to keep our domestic affairs as well run as his own hotels.
But the essence of home life is far from well-organised tidies and everything in its place: the warm chaos of a child-filled house is far from that. The advice is helpful, but none of us want to live in those houses and apartments to be seen in the posher magazines and design supplements. Seeing the television star of the moment lounging at home for the cameras of the RTÉ Guide makes us all look around and relish our chaotic little nests.
Still this book may for some smack a little too much of the Modern Bride’s Housekeeping Book that our grandmothers started their married lives with. But the stories are amusing, and the advice is sound, and Francis Brennan is enthusiastically encouraging.
Russian Roulette: The Life of Graham Greene
by Richard Greene (Little, Browne, £25.00)
This book, which runs to over 600 pages, is the first truly full length biography of the writer since the more or less official life by Norman Sherry in three long volumes. Despite his diligence as a researcher, there were indications that Mr Sherry was not at ease with some aspects of Mr Greene’s life and mentality: he strangely managed to confuse the Mexican martyr Fr Miguel Pro with the Italian stigmatist Padre Pio – there’s Catholic nit-picking for you!
Richard Green (no relation) has made use of a mass of new papers and sources that have come to light in recent decades and will be read with interest by all those marked by The Power and Glory, Brighton Rock, A Burnt Out Case and so many others. But perhaps what is needed is a study of Mr Greene’s religion. Maybe next year.
The Dickens Boy
by Thomas Keneally (Sceptre, £20.00)
In his long career Irish-Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, has always found a way to tell a great story – often mingling fact and fiction in creative ways. Schindler’s List was sold as history in one continent, a novel in another. This new tale concerns Charles Dickens’ younger son sent off to make his way in another new continent, 1970’s Australia. A solid read that explores issues of identity, place and celebrity in a most creative way.
News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger (Canongate Books, £18.99)
Compared with Harry Evans great series of books on newspapers – what they are, what they do, and how to make them – this collection of short essays by the former editor of The Guardian may disappoint. But it should still be read for the experience he brings to it: he is a voice from another age of journalism. Given the state of the media these days it is well worth reading. Here, of course, a critic must invoke the ghost of C.P. Scott, legendary editor of the old Manchester Guardian, the paper of journalism that was both elegant, strong-minded, and true – exemplified by the great Alistair Cooke.
Mr Scott reminded everyone who would write for a newspaper (including those who only send in letters): “Opinion is free, facts are sacred”. A mantra for everyone who writes. These days in the modern Guardian and nearly every other paper facts and opinions have become perilously mixed, to the danger of us all.
The Bookseller’s Tale
by Martin Latham (Particular Books, £16.99)
The author has been a bookseller in Canterbury for a generation, and here he writes about the trade, its customers and the books they seek – and often find – books often that few others could imagine reading. An ideal read for the book-obsessed person, female or male, to whom there is nothing more attractive than a dusty bookshop in a side street. Great fun all round.
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Allen Lane, £25.00)
It you wish to balance what pours out of the US about the black experience, this is the book to read. The work of a Mauritian educated in France, it develops the life and actions of a Haitian black revolutionary who really did shake up the Americas in a serious way in the 1790s, and left a heritage that informs Latin America and Africa to this date. He declared Haiti an independent black state, the first in the western world: at this time large parts of Africa, from the Ethiopian Empire downwards, were still ‘free’. He is an essential figure of the modern world, and everyone should know about him.
Ravenna Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
by Judith Herrin (Allen Lane £30.00)
To those whose minds are focused on Rome ancient, medieval and modern, the history of Byzantium – the ‘true Rome’ in the eyes of many – is often a closed world. Historian Robert Herrin, by focusing on Ravenna in Italy, rather than Constantinople, brings the glories of the eastern empire right to our doorstep. Ravenna is part of the history not just of Christianity, but of civilization itself, which is too often brushed aside or overlooked by those with other passions. Reading Mr Herrin may open the eyes of all to a city that inspired many artists (W.B. Yeats among them).
A Life on Our Planet
by David Attenborough (Ebury Press, £20.00)
And finally a book which perhaps needs no promoting. Subtitled ‘My witness statement and a vision for the future’ it should be an essential book for all those who have enjoyed the author’s writing and television work since the early 1950s. Truly one of the world’s great men of all time, an intelligence even more important now when so many elements in our culture continue to destroy and threaten the living world around us – and in our own carelessness, those elements include you and me, dear reader, which is the pity.
Next week: a selection of seasonal books for young people.