The world of paperbacks - Reviews - a discussion of several new paperback books that have been released

Contemporary Review, April, 2003

From VINTAGE we have three titles by W. G. Sebald, the German-born Professor of German Literature in the University of East Anglia who died in 2001. The first, Vertigo, is a book combining fiction and travelogue whilst the second, The Emigrants, looks at the lives of four Jewish emigrants from Germany. The third, The Rings of Saturn, is the account of a walking tour of East Anglia interspersed with the author's thoughts on the great questions of life. All three volumes have been translated from the German by Michael Hulse and are priced at [pounds sterling]7.99. Vintage has also republished Freud on Women: A Reader ([pounds sterling]8.99) edited by Prof. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, an anthology of Freud's 'main statements on female psychology' first published in 1990 and Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia. 1787-1868 ([pounds sterling]9.99), first published in 1986. In the Vintage Classics' series we have a reprint of Laurie Lee's A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia ([pounds sterling]6.99) first published in 1955.

PENGUIN BOOKS has republished in paperback Christopher Hibbert's The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill 1650-1744 ([pounds sterling]8.99) first published in hardback by Viking in 2001. Mr Hibbert remains the doyen of popular historians and biographers and in his latest title he has lost none of his ability to bring the past vividly to life for the general reader.

FABER AND FABER have reissued a revised edition of Patrick Wright's The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham ([pounds sterling]14.99). On its first publication in 1995, it was highly praised for its touching evocation of a lost world in the form of a Dorset village which was evacuated to provide more ground for tank training in the last war. The inhabitants were promised that after the war they would regain their land but the promise was never fulfilled. This paperback edition has a new introduction and some new illustrations and the text has been updated to include new materials. It remains a very moving story. Also from Faber we have Victor Davis Hanson's Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam ([pounds sterling]12.99) in which the author studies the effects of the West's military superiority in influencing world civilisation.

From SUTTON PUBLISHING we have five new historical paperbacks. The first is Richard Holland's Nero: The Man Behind the Myth ([pounds sterling]7.99) in which the journalist turned biographer seeks to separate Nero the man from the monster created by biographers, starting with Tacitus. The second is Peter White's With the Jocks ([pounds sterling]7.99), a first-hand account of fighting in the Second World War praised in this journal as 'a book to remind us of the fearful consequences of war, but also of the qualities of dogged, unassuming heroism which it can evoke'. The third new title is Audrey Williamson's The Mystery of the Princes ([pounds sterling]8.99), the first paperback edition of the 1981 revision of this fascinating study of the deaths of Edward V and his brother, Prince Richard, which calls into question Richard III's assumed guilt. The fourth new title is Anne Crawford's edition of the Letters of the Queens of England ([pounds sterling]12.99) which begins with Matilda of Flanders and ends with Henr y VIII's last consort, Queen Katherine Parr. This collection was first published in 1994 and it is good once again to have it in print. The fifth is Paul Newman's A History of Terror: Fear and Dread Through the Ages ([pounds sterling]7.99). Sutton has also republished John Southworth's Shakespeare the Actor: A Life in the Theatre ([pounds sterling]7.99) which concentrates on Shakespeare as an actor who was also a playwright.

THAMES & HUDSON have published an English-language translation of The Gardens of Versailles ([pounds sterling]18.95) with photographs by Jean-Baptiste Leroux and text by Beatrix Saule. For anyone who has visited these famous gardens this book is a spectacular reminder of the variety of pleasures which they offer. With 220 colour illustrations and three colour maps the photographer takes his readers on a tour of the various prospects set against the most dramatic skies, shades of light and variety of mists. These give the photographs a dramatic intensity that is equalled only by the gardens themselves.

SIMON AND SCHUSTER have issued paperback editions of two of their U.S. titles which appear under separate imprints. The first, published under the Free Press imprint, is Henry Kissinger's Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century ([pounds sterling]8.99), the reflections and analyses of the most famous American Secretary of State in recent years. The second title, under the Touchstone imprint, is Richard Reeves' President Nixon: Alone in the White House ([pounds sterling]l2.99) in which the author, whose dislike of Richard Nixon rather warps the text, gives a dramatic, some would say journalistic, account of the President's reaction to the Watergate Crisis. A third title, issued under the Pocket Book imprint is Bob Smith's Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir ([pounds sterling]6.99), an unusual and touching account of Shakespeare's influence on one man and through him, on others.