John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity by Garry Wills, Faber & Faber, £12.99 in UK

Not the usual adulatory take on a man who became an American legend, Wills's revisionary account of Wayne's life puts the nuts and bolts together and comes up with a kind of Frankenstein monster. The biographical details are superficial, nothing about his love affairs, his three marriages, his numerous children. Instead the emphasis is on how he became the lens through which the American people saw both their country's history and their own. He stood, in fact, for an America that people felt was disappearing. Yet at the heart of the substance, as opposed to the shadow, lay sham, for this great hero, unlike most of his acting peers, avoided doing service in the second World War. The legend still endures, though, for who can forget him in the greatest Western ever made: "The Searchers"? He may have had feet of clay, but, when he appeared on the silver screen, the angels sang.