roundup

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 17, 2003 | by Colin Waters

The Constants Of Nature by John D Barrow. Vintage, (pounds) 8.99

SOME things never change - and I'm not talking about Brian May's haircut. No, I mean the speed of light or the weight of the proton, what Barrow would call the universe's "bedrock ingredients".

We humans have become pretty adept at measuring these "constants of nature", yet our inability to explain or predict them demonstrates that our understanding of the universe has some way to go yet. There are some forbidding equations included here but don't worry, you can safely ignore them. Barrow proves to be a likeable guide to concepts such as Plank's constant, rounding out his descriptions with lashings of literary quotes (Freud, TS Eliot, ahem, George W Bush).

Barrow is even big enough to finally undermine the whole point of his book by asking whether these constants are so constant after all, and aren't changing very, very slowly.

Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy. Scribner, (pounds) 6.99

IDEALLY, movie adaptations of books should win their authors a whole new audience. Sometimes, however, a film can be so successful, people forget there was ever a book behind it. Such is the fate of James Leo Herlihy's wonderful Midnight Cowboy.

So while film fans continue to garland the movie, the book has been out of print for some time. Joe Buck, Herlihy's not too bright hero, travels to New York under the false impression he can make a fortune sleeping with love-starved cash-rich matrons. However, Joe ends up broke and homeless, his only friend a crippled conman with a dream of moving to Florida, Ratso Rizzo.

Instead of inviting you to laugh at his sleazy, loser characters, Herlihy ensures every page aches with a rare humanity. The reissue of the year so far.

Milosevic by Adam LeBor. Bloomsbury, (pounds) 8.99

THE man who presided over the disintegration of Yugoslavia is deposed and on trial at The Hague, but neither Milosevic nor his ghastly contribution to English phraseology, "ethnic cleansing", promise to fade from memory; 200,000 people died to serve his dream of a Greater Serbia.

LeBor follows the tyrant from his lonely childhood to the state- plundering Butcher of Belgrade. LeBor, who reported from the Balkans in the 1990s, constructs a pacy, informative read. He spoke with previously uninterviewed friends and family and pulls off the scoop of a lengthy interview with Milosevic's scheming wife, Mira Markovic.

LeBor demonstrates that contrary to reports at the time, the Kosovo crisis was not "the inevitable result of ancient ethnic hatreds". His book also shows that had history flexed itself differently, Milosevic might have been a banker, and the world happier.

River Thieves by Michael Crummey. Canongate, (pounds) 7.99

THE last known Beothuk Indian died in 1829, an inevitable casualty of the changes sweeping through Canada ever since the first white settlers arrived.

Crummey's fictional account of the Beothuks' disappearance focuses upon a family of settlers who live uneasily in the same wilderness. John Peyton is a trapper bringing up his son with the help of tutor, housekeeper and sometime lover, Cassie.

Into their lives come agents of the British Crown, led by Scottish naval officer David Buchan, to establish commerce between the crown and the hunted, hated Beothuks. Guided by Peyton, soldiers and settlers make contact with the Beothuks. Relations look promising, but when a prisoner swap goes horribly wrong, settlers and Beothuk begin a deadly game of tit-for-tat.

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom. Canongate, (pounds) 8.99

WITH a major new production of Hamlet playing during the Edinburgh Festival, theatregoers may want to swot up with a quick flick through Bloom's short meditation on the Danish prince.

Not that Bloom has ever seen a production of Hamlet that's satisfied him; every one, he says, has diluted its complexities. "As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death," Bloom writes, "it compares only with the world's scriptures."

Irritatingly, Bloom is prone to making Delphic pronouncements without fleshing out his meaning. Why, for example, is Milton an example of a secular writer while Sophocles isn't? But he does have a mischievous imagination; at one point he imagines Hamlet living in England and growing up to be Bloom's other favourite Shakespearean character, Falstaff.