Who Dares Wins, by Tony Geraghty (Abacus, £12.99)
Perfect holiday fantasy reading for the bloated, sofa-bound male, while being a respectable cut above the lurid-jacketed SAS fiction genre: Geraghty's history of the Special Air Service from 1950 to the Gulf war comes with a recommendation from Sir Peter de la Billière, who calls it "the leading history of the post-war SAS", an evaluation with which this reviewer is ill-disposed to argue. Scenes of commando fighting in Borneo, Liberia and Afghanistan are related with the snap and precision of a superior thriller, while the reader is invited to share in the glamour of competence conferred by acquaintance with terse military jargon ("CQB": close quarter battle; "Halo": high-altitude, low-opening). Understandably attractive, too, is the macho mystique carefully husbanded by the regiment and its admirers, well summed up in a quote from survival expert Lofty Wiseman: "Death is Nature's way of saying you have just failed SAS selection."SP
On Photography, by Susan Sontag (Penguin, £7.99)
Reissued with a pugnacious blurb from John Berger, who calls it "the most original and important work yet written on the subject", Sontag's 1973 collection of essays is a very different project from, say, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Sontag's totalising prose pretends to understand and classify its subject, smothering it with words, whereas Barthes converses with photography as though it were an equal. Sontag is good at the grand, sonorous claim - photographs are "a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing" - but rarely deigns to develop it. (Why is ethics more important than grammar in her opinion? Is an ethics of seeing somehow more all-encompassing than an ethics of looking?) Her touchstone practitioners are such as Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, but the indulgence of her impressive talent for high-wire epistemological theorising leaves her little time to talk about actual photographs, and the book contains no images at all. SP
Mother Tongues: Travels Through Tribal Europe by Helena Drysdale (Picador, £7.99)
Drysdale, her painter/photographer partner Richard Pomeroy and their daughters Blanche (not yet one at the start) and Tallulah (three) spent 18 months travelling around Europe in a camper van, meeting speakers of minority languages as far apart as Lapland and Sardinia, Brittany and Macedonia. At times Mother Tongues resembles the dotty hippy odyssey in Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky retold from the mother's perspective, as the captivatingly precocious Tallulah ("I do love you mummy but I'm bored by you") soon resents being taken away from London comforts and friends. But it's the quirky combination of family adventure and quasi-academic project that gives the book its enthralling originality. Only one aspect of it disappoints: instead of appearing in the relevant chapters in the text, the photos Pomeroy took en route are bafflingly thrown away on the jacket with no identifying captions. JD
Italy and Its Discontents1980-2001, by Paul Ginsborg (Penguin, £9.99)
Covering the same period as Jonathan Fenby's recent On the Brink: The Trouble with France, this study similarly focuses on the obstructions to a fully democratic culture emerging in a country it views with fascinated ambivalence. But the authors' approaches could scarcely be more different. The journalist delights in personality, often recalling his meetings with key figures; whereas Ginsborg is an academic historian whose hallmark is a rat-a-tat of stats, and his book closes with almost 200 pages of data and footnotes. The number-cruncher can tell a story with dash when he allows himself to, as his sections on Berlusconi and Italy's relations with the EU show; but more typical is the kind of collating of research by economists or sociologists (revealingly referred to as "scientific literature") exemplified by his dauntingly arid opening chapter on Italy's economy. A model textbook, then, but not recommended as a bedtime read. JD
