10 to try: Book reviews

Time Out picks ten of the best fiction and non-fiction releases Discuss this article

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Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story Of Bonnie & Clyde

Jeff Guinn
4/5
Given the present state of America’s economy, Jeff Guinn’s terrific biography of Depression-era gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker couldn’t be more timely. Blown out of the west Texas dustbowl and on to the front pages by a succession of bank robberies, killings and daring escapes from the law, this seemingly glamorous pair became folk heroes to many and, during a crime spree that lasted from 1931 until their slaughter in 1934, were America’s most famous couple.

Guinn’s assiduously researched book captures the hopelessness of the Depression with more concision and verve than a hundred history books or hokey ballads, and brings to life a time when crooks could outrun lawmen who had neither two-way radios nor interstate jurisdiction. Its real success, however, comes from placing us on the running boards of history for Bonnie and Clyde’s breathless sprint toward infamy.

Doing for the sharp-suited ’30s hoodlum what the second half of Scorsese’s Goodfellas did for the Mafia, Guinn presents a life of discomfort, tedium and stress that’s a million miles from the somewhat larky 1967 Warren Beatty film version of events (up until which Clyde’s name had always preceded Bonnie’s). Clyde was in fact a scrawny little fellow with a pronounced limp from lopping off two of his toes to avoid a prison work detail and Bonnie had to be carried around during most of their exploits after battery acid from a car crash ruined her right leg. This is the clearest view yet of a pair of mythologised hoodlums whose career illuminates the short, brutal period that marked the last days of the Wild West.
Adam Lee Davies
Simon&Schuster Dhs98 Available to order from Magrudy’s.

The Storm Of War

Andrew Roberts
5/5
This is an exceptional accomplishment. With The Storm of War, Roberts has produced a readable, absorbing and intelligent history of World War II that switches dexterously between the different theatres as it heads towards its atomic finale. Like the generals he writes about, Roberts seems to be going for broke: wiping out his rivals by producing the definitive single volume story of the war, something that requires mastering overlapping chronologies and questionable psychologies, and the considering of each battle in isolation as well as in the context of history’s most devastating and, indeed, globe-wrapping conflict.

Roberts can do this because he gives the book a spine – his consistent argument that Hitler was a poor general whose efficacy was further compromised by his creed: the Nazism that led him to make decisions that were neither pragmatic nor realistic, and ultimately cost him the war and his life (along with that of several million others). Not unrelated to this argument is the question of Roberts’s own politics: his fervent if uncomplicated Conservatism (with a big ‘C’) could lead him to make assertions rooted more in ideology than they are in reality, but that inclination is more or less reined in.

Sure, you know exactly what his take on Hiroshima and Dresden will be (and, in the case of Dresden, he goes further down the path of ruthless utilitarianism than you might expect) and there are more cheeky jabs at the French (‘De Gaulle’s staple diet between 1940 and 1944 was the hand that fed him’) than strictly necessary, but with most of the controversial issues he does his best to present both sides; he is relentlessly evenhanded in his criticism and praise of soldiers, generals and politicians on both sides. Essential.
Peter Watts
Allen Lane Dhs163 Available to order from Magrudy’s.

Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon
4/5
From Thomas Pynchon, an author we expect to take decade-long breaks, now emerges his second novel in three years. The pace does him good: Inherent Vice, besides being the literary giant’s most accessible work, is the kind of confident, relaxed effort that might signal a golden age ahead. Pynchon has produced a detective mystery as laid-back as its hero, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a beach-town-dwelling private investigator who suspects that his psychedelic ’60s are ending.

And they are. It’s spring of 1970, and Pynchon’s hazy Los Angeles, as vivid a locale as any he’s described, is wracked with paranoia, a combo of Nixon-funded police fascism and surf-band diffidence. (One glorious rant from Doc’s lawyer friend, Sauncho Smilax, connects Charles Manson, the Vietcong and StarKist Tuna’s animated pitchman, ‘also named Charlie!’) Inherent Vice is no mere nostalgia trip, though. Leaning into a modern idiom, the author taps into the same cheeky cinematic vein as The Big Lebowski – Doc lackadaisically pursuing a wealthy land developer and a wayward blonde ex-girlfriend – along with, more ringingly, Robert Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye.

Quickly, the novel grabs you in a sexier way than anything since The Crying of Lot 49, but with its familiar post-Chinatown structure (and an inevitable doozy of a conspiracy) comes an undeniable lightness. Drug deals and loan sharks are an underwhelming conclusion from a book that intimates a deeper social indictment; the heaviest it gets here is a Palo Verdes community dad leaning in and insisting to Doc, ‘We’re in place.’ Still, the welcome vibe of the novel has the feeling of cruising around suburbs on a warm night; it may become an LA classic.
Joshua Rothkopf
Penguin Dhs119 Available to order from Magrudy’s.

The Accidental Billionaires

Ben Mezrich
2/5
When Mark Zuckerberg hit on the idea of hacking into the Harvard server to create a social network for college kids, fellow student and aspiring hedge fund investor Eduardo Saverin smelled an opportunity. The Harvard Connection quickly became Facebook, and the site was just three years away from Microsoft’s US$15billion (Dhs55billion) valuation. Along the way, lawsuits were filed, women were defiled and there was plenty of all-night typing in front of glowing computer screens. (Take it with you on the metro and gasp a lot while you read – it’ll be quite the ice breaker.) Mezrich is clearly writing for Hollywood here and he often plays fast and loose with the facts. As such, some scenes just don’t ring true, such as the steamy bathroom scene between Zuckerberg, supposedly an awkward geek with a ‘dead fish’ handshake, and a girl he met at a Bill Gates conference (this is before the site hit the big time and groupies poured in).

The great irony of Facebook is that as the site brought millions together, the founders’ friendship was disintegrating. We have to rely on Saverin’s version of events throughout because Zuckerberg declined the author’s ‘friend request’ and refused to be interviewed. With him went any chance of impartiality, or of sympathy with the bickering of these wealthy, privileged twenty-somethings.

Ultimately, The Accidental Billionaires has the perfect dramatic narrative for a Hollywood thriller, but you sense that the really juicy story will only come out when the notoriously publicity-shy Zuckerberg writes more than just another piece of HTML coding.
Steve Pill
William Heinemann Dhs78 Available at Magrudy’s.

We are all Made of Glue

Marina Lewycka
2/5
This big, bawdy, sledge-hammer subtle novel certainly knows how to enjoy itself. Its plot splurges in all directions like over-enthusiastically applied Tippex: a lovelorn journalist, Georgie, attempts to rescue an eccentric old lady from the social workers and estate agents who want to turf her out of her mouldering North London mansion, while simultaneously trying to save her son from religious paranoia, pursue a revenge-sex affair and write a romantic novel. Not surprisingly, the pace is pretty brisk.

Georgie is a frustrating narrator; forever getting sidetracked by her libido and hamstrung by anxious dithering, she’s not the saviour anyone would choose in a fix. The real star of the show, though, is the little old lady, Naomi Shapiro. She is a fantastically well-executed comic creation: feisty, wayward, stubborn and almost suicidally unhygienic, she is a survivor who embraces life in a way that is both daunting and inspiring for the timid Georgie. When it transpires that Mrs Shapiro’s past is full of secrets, her new friend determines to unearth the truth and along the way she has her eyes opened to both the Holocaust and the Nakba that subsequently befell the Palestinians. Georgie, ever the romantic, says from the start that she likes happy endings, and there’s never much doubt that she’ll get one, but her rather glib solutions to history’s big problems show up the weakness of Lewycka’s big-brush approach, no matter how ironically it may be intended.

Far better to ignore the platitudes about peace, love and harmony and just enjoy the scintillating characters – not just Mrs Shapiro and her hard-smoking conspirator, The Bonker Lady, but the two social workers Mrs Good Knee (evil) and Ms Bad Eel (nice), and the diabolically handsome estate agent, Mr Diabello. These people, and Lewycka’s do-you-dare-me determination to shoehorn in as many references to glue, bonding and adherence as she possibly can, are what spur the plot along and stop the book from coming, yes indeedy, unstuck.
Lisa Mullen
Fig Tree Dhs78 Available at Magrudy’s.