Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye at some of the best paperbacks currently on offer.
Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta, £8.99 sterling)
Is it possible to live, like 30 per cent of the US population, on under $8 an hour? Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover and discovers the sheer exhaustion of working in the service industry, where waitresses work seven hours without a break, where maids doing hard physical labour are forbidden a glass of water and forced to "work through pain" and where sales assistants can be fired for trying to organise a union. With wit, energy and great perception, she writes about the struggle necessary for a single, healthy woman to earn enough to support herself and to live somewhere decent. Her conclusions: that a job is not automatically a way out of poverty - and that she, as a middle-class, white, native English speaker with a doctorate, is no better able to survive on poverty wages than the people she worked with. A gripping, shocking read about the realities of life in the wealthiest nation in the world.- Sarah Marriott
Little Green Man by Simon Armitage (Penguin, £6.99 sterling)
Lad-lit with a poignant undertone, this book keeps you holding your breath as it taunts you with the threat of danger. Barney seems never to have got over losing his position as head and bully of his school chums, whom he watched complete school and move on after he dropped out at 16. While still in their teens, his gang had revered the little green man (which he discovered in the wreckage of a particularly bad stunt) as a kind of idol, and performed reckless feats to assert their dominance and gain possession of it. Now that Barney is an adult and loser, with an estranged wife and autistic son, he calls the old group together to resume their childish game - but of course the stakes are much higher now. Armitage shows what it means to be a bully from the bully's side, the pressures that corner a young sensitive boy into craving power and manipulating others to get it. The game collapses on Barney in the end, forcing him finally to grow up and accept adulthood and himself. - Christine Madden
In the name of justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger, by Anthony Hayward (Bloomsbury, £8.99 sterling)
If the first casualty of war is truth then thank goodness for John Pilger, a man of conscience. "Impartiality" and "balance" are words he cherishes. Pilger has covered many of the world's political upheavals for TV, always on the look out for victories of ordinary people against authority. He has covered wars, genocide, mass-murder and their often tragic after-effects in such places as Cambodia, Vietnam, East Timor, Burma and Czechoslovakia. This book is essentially about the myopic, stupid cruelty of governments, which sometimesinvolves their simply standing idly by - and this includes the USA and Britain - and about Pilger's ability to get to the guts of the story. Men at the top play a mad game and the people inevitably suffer. It is not surprising Pilger's work is frequently unpalatable to authority and for this we should be thankful. This book is a fitting tribute to his brave efforts and a fine work. - Owen Dawson
number9dream by David Mitchell (Sceptre, 6.99 sterling)
Young Eiji Miyake sets off from his quiet country home to Tokyo in search of the father he has never met - Dad never professed any interest in him. Exuberant, often funny, frequently violent and at times inventively bewildering, this 2001 Booker runner-up is quite a performance. Mitchell is certainly an original, if more Martin Amis than Haruki Murakami. Although Mitchell's Tokyo appears to present postmodern Japan at its most hyper commercial, the fact remains this fast moving quest, based on narrator Eiji's misadventures, could have been set anywhere - it's as much London or New York as the Japanese capital. Yet despite the high-tech video and computer culture as well as the snappy one-liners and surreal dream sequences, number9dream is impressively reflective, almost gentle. Much of its appeal rests in Eiji, a dreamer, who makes friends easily, is neither too heroic nor overly pathetic and who, most appealingly, lives largely Walter Mitty-like in his imagination. - Eileen Battersby
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001 by Gore Vidal (Abacus, £10.99 sterling)
Despite his light-hearted digressions and tone of ironic detachment, there is no mistaking Gore Vidal's political passion and his frustration at being a prophet without influence in his own land. Here is a picture of a corrupt and dangerous federal regime in which politicians are functionaries hired by the untaxed super-rich to maintain a permanent state of war not only against poor foreigners but against Americans as well, from the disenfranchised blacks of Florida to the children of Waco and the taxpayers who shell out trillions on "defence" but are not allowed to fund a health service. After years searching for a replacement for what Vidal sees as the chimera of the Cold War, September 11th has given this regime fresh confidence. To back up his case, Vidal includes an eight-page list of conflicts initiated by the US since Hiroshima, each with its own blustering pet name (Vigilant Sentinel, Fiery Vigil). An antidote for political indifference. - Giles Newington
Fluoride: Drinking Ourselves to Death by Barry Groves (Newleaf £13.40 sterling )
The fact that the information in this book tends to overlap in several chapters does little to detract attention from its subject. It is a rivetting examination of the effect of fluoride and how all medical evidence on its dangers has been overlooked or dismissed out of hand for the last few decades. Basing the book on a series of questions and answers sent to UK dentists by the British Fluoridation Society, Groves provides scientific data to refute the answers in a clear and simple way. The conclusions of the book, from the fact that fluoride is more toxic than lead and only slightly less so than arsenic to the evidence that in very small amounts it has resulted in cancer in rats, are astounding. He maintains no adequate research has been carried out on the effects of fluoride and no recommended daily intake has been set. More frighteningly he goes on to quote research linking fluoride to damage of the central nervous system, Alzheimer's disease and low IQ. - Caroline Crawford
A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders (Penguin, £7.99 sterling)
The sisters are four Macdonalds, all of whom, despite coming from a modest background in Victorian England, married or were the mothers of eminent men. Alice was the mother of the poet Rudyard Kipling; Georgiana married the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones; Agnes was the mother of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin; and Louisa was the wife of the President of the Royal Academy Edward Poynter. In her intriguing biography, Flanders uses their story to examine Victorian life - both public and private - and shows both how the Macdonalds' lives were a reflection of the new permeability of the British class system and how the women had to abandon their own talents in order to devote themselves to their domestic roles. It's scholarly but lively and much of the the delight comes from her attention to the - frequently horrifying - details of social and domestic life, from the prescription of laudanaum and laxatives for almost any ailment to the list of chores to be done on washdays. - Cathy Dillon