Tony Gould

A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics. Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief of Time magazine and has ten years’ experience of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  He knows what happens on the ground, how small a fraction of charitable donations ever reaches the people it is intended to help; and he is not a fan of aid agencies, characterised here as ‘Western arrogance in a white SUV’. Perry’s hero is a man from New Jersey called Ray Chambers. Never heard of him?

Coda, by Simon Gray Were Simon Gray alive today, I could not have reviewed this book. Friends should not review each other’s work or reviewing becomes a form of puffery. But death changes everything. Coda, so named because it rounds off the trilogy of ‘Smoking Diaries’ (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette), is a meditation on death, or rather dying, an account of living on borrowed time — how Simon would have pounced on that phrase, ‘borrowed time’, and subjected it to scrutiny: why borrowed? who from? can it be paid back? ‘and so forth’, as he might add.

The story of Dr John Snow’s investigations into the causes of the cholera epidemics in mid-Victorian London has been written up several times, most recently in a book by Sandra Hempel which I reviewed in these pages six months ago. So do we need yet another account of them? Perhaps not, except that Steven Johnson approaches them from an unusually interesting angle: his book is less concerned with medical history than with urban history and, in particular, the rise of mega- cities. ‘We are now, as a species,’ he claims, ‘dependent on dense urban living as a survival strategy.

The massacre of nearly 400 unarmed civilians and the wounding of over 1,000 others in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh (a barren enclosure walled in by houses) on the unlucky 13 April 1919 has a far greater historical resonance than the incident would seem to merit. This is not to make light of what the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, called ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in sinister isolation’, accusing the perpetrator of the deed, Brigadier-General Dyer, of ‘frightfulness’ (a word then redolent of German atrocities in the first world war).

A book with a title like Epileptic does not raise high expectations: will it be an account of suffering nobly borne, or a worthy medical treatise perhaps? Not a bit of it, this memoir is a graphics extravaganza spread over 361 pages, bursting with energy and wild imaginings, a comic tour de force that is as emotionally gut-wrenching as it is visually stunning. For those who associate the word ‘comic’ with Dan Dare and the Eagle, or the firm of D. C. Thomson, this book will be a revelation, an eloquent (probably more so in the original French than in this American English translation), moving and relentlessly honest dissection of a family gradually overwhelmed by the eldest child’s epilepsy. The author/artist, David B.

The sixth in the ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ series of novels is as delightful as any of its predecessors. Mma Ramotswe and her able assistant, Mma Makutsi (‘the most distinguished graduate of her year from the Botswana Secretarial College’ with a 97 per cent pass mark), continue to dispense true justice in a corrupt world while experiencing to the full the moral and emotional stresses of life. Cheerful ladies though they may be — and their virtues and foibles certainly cheer the reader — their triumphs over adversity do not come without a cost. Their vulnerability, as well as their humanity, is what makes them so attractive.

Since Henry Hobhouse wrote his story of five plants that changed the world, Seeds of Change, nearly 20 years ago, the history of commodities has become a fashionable literary genre. So he must rate as one of its pioneers. But unlike many of his imitators, he has not been content to make a whole book out of a single commodity, such as nutmeg or indigo. In the present work, which is a kind of long-delayed sequel to Seeds of Change, he deals with four - timber, wine, rubber and tobacco - thus giving value for money at least.

This racy tale of plague in the modern era focuses on two outbreaks 100 years apart: Hong Kong 1894 and Surat 1994. Edward Marriott treats the earlier outbreak as an episode of medical detection, in which two competing scientists, a famous Japanese and a less well-known Frenchman, are bent on discovering the bacillus that causes bubonic plague, and the later one as an example of what happens to people when plague strikes, how they behave in a panic situation. These parallel stories are intercalated by other actual, or narrowly averted, or potential outbreaks of plague in San Francisco, Madagascar, Japan and New York.