The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm (Granta, £8.99)
Does the world really need yet another book about Sylvia Plath? Apparently so. It turns out, however, that this somewhat misleadingly titled volume is actually more of a meditation on biography. Janet Malcolm considers what the numerous authors writing about the tortured poet's personality sought to get out of it, and ruminates on the impossible task of reconstructing a life. Much of the very readable narrative is taken up by Malcolm's portraits of the biographers she interviews (Jacqueline Rose appears as "a sleek cat" with "a few feathers still around her mouth"), together with details of how they live and what they wear (from Anne Stevenson's dowdy slacks to Clarissa Roche's crazy scarves). But while her main achievement is to bring other people's investments in "Sylvia" into the foreground, we learn nothing substantial about Malcolm's own pro-Hughes motivations ... not even what she is wearing.
Jo Littler
A Clone of Your Own? The Science and Ethics of Cloning, by Arlene Judith Klotzko (Oxford, £8.99)
According to Klotzko, "human reproductive cloning is not a matter of if; it's a matter of when". When Dolly the Franken-sheep hit the headlines in 1996 it was the culmination of a scientific dream that began 60 years earlier in Germany. Klotzko tells the story of that dream, and argues that cultural anxieties about out-of-control scientists have prejudiced us against a potentially powerful technology: "science fiction has coloured our attitudes to the science facts of cloning." Clones need not be the stuff of nightmares. Those geranium cuttings on your window-sill are clones: "Britain, the land of gardeners, is also the land of clones." This readable and intelligent introduction to the science and ethics of cloning sweeps away many myths, including the idea that in a future brave new world it will be possible to clone a perfect copy of yourself: "there will never EVER be another you." Phew.
PD Smith
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, by Christopher de Bellaigue (HarperPerennial, £8.99)
Billed as a "memoir of Iran" but defying genre, being also history, ancient and modern, secular and theological, plus a journal of the texture of life around the back of the Islamic Republic - among the coarse tiles, scabby bricks and arid gullies of diverted rivulets. Perhaps Bellaigue wrote it for his Iranian-Belgian-English son, born during the book's composition, who will surely in adulthood find the 1979 revolution and Iran-Iraq war even more incomprehensible than did his father. Bellaigue's perception of "the worldliness of Persia and its relish for the morally ambiguous" is astute; his senses are acute, registering each puff of dust or bubble in a waterpipe. He interpolates the racket of caged finches in a teahouse between the revelations of a seminary revolutionary; he records the dawn hanging of a murderer in a Tehran square with Orwellian calm and clarity. And, oh, how well he writes.
Vera Rule
Natalie Wood: A Life, by Gavin Lambert (Faber, £8.99)
Enter, screen right: a Tsarist escapee from Russia, fleeing to California via Shanghai. This is Maria Tatuloff, an "emotional terrorist" of a mother, living through her daughter, moulding her as a child star, Americanising her from Natasha Gurdin to Natalie Wood, aiming to turn her into Hollywood royalty. Stories about Natalie Wood, like stories about her mother (and indeed about Sylvia Plath), speak volumes about the restrictions of mid-20th-century femininity and its legacies. Wood was frequently given unchallenging roles, and frustration at the lack of interesting parts after starring in such films as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story formed the backdrop to her alcohol and pill dependency and subsequent death in her 40s. Lambert's biography is extensive, capacious and conventional in form, soberly assessing the detail of Wood's life from the child star dandled on Orson Welles's knee to the salacious, straight-to-TV circumstances of her death. JL
Wider Than the Sky: A Revolutionary View of Consciousness, by Gerald M Edelman (Penguin, £8.99)
According to Emily Dickinson, the brain is "wider than the sky" for "the one the other will contain / With ease". This wonderful thought raises high expectations, but unfortunately Edelman does not deliver. His Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992) was a superb account of scientific and philosophical attempts to explain consciousness. This book again tries to prove that the miracle of qualia (subjective experience, to you and me) can be explained by a "biological theory of consciousness" with no need for any spooky ghosts in the machine. His money is on neural Darwinism, or "global brain theory", which uses population thinking to explain the "phenomenal gift of consciousness". Bright Air spoke both eloquently and amusingly about this most fascinating of subjects. But this "small book" on a big theme adds little to his previous work, which unfortunately (Penguin please note) is now out of print. PDS
