Latest paperback releases reviewed.
A Woman in Berlin Anonymous Virago, £7.99
Anyone brainwashed by war films and computer games - or indeed superpower governments - into thinking war is glamorous should put this book at the top of their reading list. After 12 years of Nazi rule, with civilisation crumbling around them, city-dwellers - most of them women - huddle in air-raid shelters as all civic amenities dwindle and die. Going to the pump presents danger from rape by victory-intoxicated Russian soldiers, yet still the women of Berlin, sardonic in a bravery brought on by despair, quip "better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead". Reprinted after 50 years, the anonymous diary marks the chaos and anarchy suffered by the hapless women - and the often hypocritical reaction of the men who unwillingly, but also unthinkingly, left them vulnerable and defenceless. It illustrates that there can be no winners or losers in war, only survivors - if you can call it that. Christine Madden
The Rocky Years Ferdia Mac Anna Hodder Headline, €9.99
Published two years ago as The Last of the Bald Heads, this is Mac Anna's autobiography of an "almost-legend", the son of luvvie parents (his dad was Abbey director Tomas Mac Anna) who chanced his arm at being a rock star in the exploding Dublin punk scene of the late 1970s, under the radiant moniker Rocky de Valera and the Gravediggers. Alas, superstardom never came his way, although celebrity eventually did through his writing and broadcasting, and with the publication of his debut novel, The Last of the High Kings, in 1991. Fortune of a darker kind, however, fell when Mac Anna suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1985 and was diagnosed with testicular cancer a year later. Mac Anna recently reformed Rocky de Valera and the Gravediggers, but this book is a wry reminder of the dirty old days of Dublin rock. Kevin Courtney
The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code Michael Haag and Veronica Haag Rough Guides, £6.99
Everyone else has jumped on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon, so why not the Rough Guides? This, it claims, is about "the book, the movie and the truth". It's the umpteenth publication to promise this, but its advantage is that the Rough Guides have become a byword for navigation through unfamiliar territory, and, as readers of The Da Vinci Code will testify, it's a book that leaves the head spinning. So, here we get a guide to the author, the book, the context, the movie and the locations of the story. It gives neat summations of the obvious issues, such as whether the figure to Jesus's right in The Last Supper is a woman, the Priory of Sion, Mary Magdalene's flight to France and Jesus's supposed bloodline. If you're desperate for answers before seeing the movie, this is a decent place to start. If you're desperate to escape the whole fuss, that's a trickier task altogether. Shane Hegarty
Those Feet David Winner Bloomsbury, £8.99
Following his dazzling treatise on Dutch football, Brilliant Orange, David Winner here examines the muddier charms of the English game and how the style of play developed there, arguing that football was never intended to be the beautiful game by the nation that invented it. Rather, he argues, it began as an aggressive, combative means of moulding young boys into men, a game where showy individualism was frowned upon. Winner argues convincingly that the game in England grew out of a sense of declinism resulting from the break-
up of the empire and that it spread rapidly through the public school system as a means of keeping young men "pure" from sins of the flesh. More than a football book, this is an examination of the mindset of the English nation, and how it has manifested itself through the game, and Winner's easy style keeps it bouncing along. Ciaran Murray
The Blueshirts Maurice Manning Gill & Macmillan, €12.99
The uncertainty that followed Fianna Fáil's 1932 general election victory among its opponents pervades this seminal study of the Blueshirts. However, the author's claim that Blueshirtism differed from its continental lookalikes because it stressed its commitment to democracy and freedom of speech is incongruous alongside passages quoting leaders such as Ned Cronin, who threatened, "if a dictatorship is necessary for the Irish people we are going to have one". New evidence has come to light since the book was published 35 years ago, as acknowledged in the foreword to this third edition, but the author's contention that there were important differences between the Blueshirts and the other shirted - and Fascist - movements springing up across Europe in the 1930s, brings to mind the old adage that if it walks and talks like a duck, it is a duck. Tim Fanning
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music Blair Tindall Atlantic Books, £8.99
Blair Tindall had a glittering oboe career in front of her in the 1980s. Straight out of music college, she was playing regularly with the New York Philharmonic and the ultra-fashionable Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Then came an orgy of one-night stands, drugs and booze. Her playing suffered, and in the Darwinistic orchestral world, she didn't last five minutes. By the time she was 26, her reputation was in shreds and her career effectively over. Tindall tries to make a universal story - classical music is corrupt and degenerate - out of her own experience. Instead, this bitter, unpleasant book only serves to demonstrate why, however talented, she must have been very difficult to work with. As the conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, would have said: "If music be the food of love, play on. If not, shut up." Richard Aldous