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From The Times
April 25, 2008

Iain Finlayson's non-fiction reviews of the week: April 26, 2008

The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya by Åsne Seierstad
Virago, £14.99 Buy the book here

Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul, again reminds us that most of the world is not the safe, materially comfortable, risk-averse society that we take for granted. She is a wonderful storyteller: any novelist would be grateful for her first-hand material, narrative style and personal courage in honest reporting from war and its aftermath. This time she returns secretly to Chechnya, a decade after the Russian invasion, to report on a brutalised society, of children who become feral for survival, of abusive parents and the terrors of social chaos.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale
Bloomsbury, £14.99 Buy the book here

The brutal murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in Wiltshire in 1860 is a true-life boilerplate mystery that has influenced writers of sensational fiction from Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Conan Doyle to the present day. It is a classic country house murder with a closed group of suspects and a sharp archetypal detective, Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard. Summerscale carefully folds the case and its terrible consequences in layers of circumstantial social detail, literary references, Victorian psychological attitudes and period media hysteria.

All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora by David Rensin
Yellow Jersey, £12.99 Buy the book here

Miki Dora, the first charismatic surfing icon, would do anything for a perfect wave: and his awestruck friends would do anything for Miki Dora. Rensin has spoken to hundreds of them, all of whom are indulgently realistic about Dora's scams, frauds, demands and egotism. He despised mainstream surfing in California and made no concessions to celebrity or commercialism. This great book is his iconoclastic epitaph.

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