Smash hit

BOUND FOR GLORY
By Woody Guthrie
Penguin, £8.99

A Radio 4 music journalist recently asked: “What if Bob Dylan had been born in Britain?” If ever there were a damn fool question, that was it — unless someone had asked, “what if Woody Guthrie had been born in Birmingham” (and we’re not talking Birmingham, Alabama)? What we have in Britain is the romantic topographical prose and poetry of Edward Thomas; what America has is the Dustbowl poetry of Woody Guthrie in folk songs that have become national anthems: This Land Is Your Land, I Ain’t Got No Home, This Train Is Bound for Glory. Guthrie was born in 1912 in rural Oklahoma and grew up in the American Deep South. During the Great Depression he took to the road as a hobo. He was one of the great Drifter poets and musicians, one of the great heroes of the dispossessed, and no less great in his autobiography, which has become one of the classic texts of Americana. It was Pete Seeger who coaxed Guthrie into writing stories and so evoked the wild, rough genius of what Joe Klein calls his “militant informality” as a writer.

WORLD ON FIRE
By Amy Chua
Arrow, £7.99

Chua’s chilling thesis is that the opening of international markets in the post-Cold War globalising world has intensified resentment of “market-dominant minorities” and provoked a backlash against the economically advantaged. The end of history turns out to be just a new chapter in a never-ending story: instead of founding a utopian global democracy of capitalist free markets, the groundwork seems to have been laid for religious conflict and ethnic hatred.

IN SEARCH OF THE PLEASURE PALACE
By Marc Almond
Sidgwick & Jackson, £12.99

Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse, sighs the middle-aged singer of Tainted Love as the music fades and the soft cell of gilded life hardens into tortoiseshell. Almond tours the modern global counter-culture in a quest to retrieve memory and establish a post-pop identity. Faced with a compromising situation (a suburban swingers’ night in Croydon, for instance), he makes his excuses and leaves, ennui and entropy getting the better of erectile enthusiasm.

CAUGHT IN THE WEB: Dreaming Up the World of Spider-Man 2
By Mark Cotta Vaz
Titan, £14.99

I know, I know, this looks like a glossy tie-in booster book for Spidey 2 anoraks; but if it’s supposed to sell the movie to me, it does a terrific job. Cotta Vaz gives us the production process from storyboards to special effects, focusing on the hi-tech development of super-villain Doc Ock and featuring the conceptual artwork of Paul Catling. Not just for movie buffs and computer-generated image geeks.

THE INTERROGATOR’S WAR
By Chris Mackey with Greg Miller
John Murray, £14.99

“Inside the Secret War against al-Qaeda” is topical in the light thrown on US interrogators by the pictures from Abu Ghraib which Mackey, a veteran interrogator, condemns as the work of “a small number of sadists operating without a shred of oversight”. His professional insider narrative describes the development of modern high-pressure interrogation techniques and their effects not only on prisoners but also on the interrogators.

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