BLUE-EYED SON: The Story of an Adoption
by Nicky Campbell
Pan, £6.99
£6.64 (free p&p)

The blue-eyed TV and radio personality, who was adopted, here presents himself and the story of his “birth family”. His mother, it transpires, was a Northern Irish Protestant nurse. His father was a Northern Irish Catholic policeman — and Republican.

Campbell sets the tone of this confessional with his opening line: “I was committing adultery in Room 634 of the Holiday Inn in Birmingham when my wife rang to say they’d found my mother.” This is fast food in prose. It is also just about the longest sentence in the book, the rest of which proceeds with the plasticity and originality of a fish supper. “For me, emotionally, it (discovering that he had three half-siblings) was bam zap pow followed by crash sock splatt.

No wonder it knocked me for six.” Soundbites proliferate. On every page. Wikid. Travelling from Scotland to London is Campbellised as “I zipped down from the land of Ring of Bright Water to the city of recycled toilet water”. The typos are as good as it gets — for example, a telephonist apparently asks Campbell “whose calling?” — and come as a relief. This book is classified as “biography”. It is inadvertent self-parody as well.

Despite itself, though, this book succeeds. Campbell’s self-obsession and superficiality may be insufferable and nauseating. But his account is very moving as well. Pathos will out, and there is plenty here. It doesn’t make you like Campbell. He is, though, hurting and human. And honest enough to say so. I think.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
by Jon Ronson
Picador, £7.99
£7.59 (free p&p)

Is “military intelligence” a contradiction in terms? The British investigative journalist Jon Ronson thinks so, and here, from diligent and often difficult research, he explores the zanier reaches of the military mind. In this account of the US Army, he gives us psychic spies, men who think they can walk through walls, Uri Geller as a super-soldier and, hence the title, men who believe they can kill goats simply by staring at them.

Ronson’s implication is that the whole US Army is nuts, and that after 9/11 the CIA and especially the Bush Administration is paranoid at best, prepared to do anything for the sake of Homeland Security. This implication of universality is unfair, and discredits those who believe war is an inevitable price of peace. But the War on Terror has all too many extremists, not all of them Muslim. As Ronson shows, many of them are within the US establishment, and Christian. It is a chilling tale.

The intention is probably to provoke a fury of indignation, protesters at the Pentagon and so on. The effect, however, is plain funny. Warrior Monks? “Visual aesthetics to instil psychically in the enemy a disincentive to attack”? Secondly, the effect is to reveal a profound paradox. Ronson interviews a colonel obsessed with the evidence that 80 per cent of US soldiers in Vietnam fired high at first. We are pacific beings. The people that Ronson caricatures, and who probably deserve it, are people who, deep down, want not war, but peace.

THE BIG HOUSE
by Christopher Simon Sykes
HarperPerennial, £8.99
£8.54 (free p&p)

They are dying, and quickly. Whether through the intemperance of taxation, the incompetence or misfortunes of their owners or the march of history, archetypal English country houses are now few. Passing pop and soccer stars purchase what were once homes loved or sometimes loathed by the same family for generations. The National Trust saves others but only as effigies.

One exception is the subject of this book. High on the Yorkshire Wolds stands a house called Sledmere, built in 1751 by a successful Hull merchant called Sykes. More than 250 years later Sledmere is still owned and lived in by a Sykes, Sir Tatton Sykes, 8th Baronet, and elder brother of this book’s author.

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