A heady mix of vice and voodoo
Ian Thomson 1 December 2012
Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene’s Adventures in Haiti and Central AmericaBernard Diederich, with a foreword by Pico Iyer
Peter Owen, pp.300, £20, ISBN: 9780720614886
By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of… Read more
Ian Thomson 3 November 2012
The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War Halik Kochanski
Allen Lane, pp.734, £30, ISBN: 9781846143540
Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler… Read more
Ian Thomson 1 September 2012
NW Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, pp.296, £18.99, ISBN: 9780241144145
For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’… Read more
Ian Thomson 23 June 2012
My Song: A Memoir Harry Belafonte, with Michael Schnayerson
Canongate, pp.469, £14.99, ISBN: 9780857865861
Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average… Read more
Ian Thomson 2 June 2012
The Second World War Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld, pp.863, 25
The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War —…Read more
Ian Thomson 19 May 2012
Harry H. Corbett: The Front Legs of the Cow Susannah Corbett
The History Press, pp.320, 20
The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of… Read more
Ian Thomson 31 March 2012
Under the Same Stars Tim Lott
Simon & Schuster, pp.341, 16.99
Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned… Read more
Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers
Ian Thomson 18 February 2012
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a… Read more
Ian Thomson 28 January 2012
The Last Holiday: A Memoir Gil Scott-Heron
Canongate, pp.319, 20
At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century… Read more
Ian Thomson 7 January 2012
The New Granta Book of Travel edited by Liz Jobey, with an introduction by Jonathan Raban
Granta, pp.429, 25
We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel… Read more
Ian Thomson 10 December 2011
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its… Read more
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
Ian Thomson 5 November 2011
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller
Simon & Schuster, pp.238, 14.99
There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled… Read more
Ian Thomson 17 September 2011
Murder in Notting Hill Mark Olden
Zero Books, pp.196, 11.99
One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds.… Read more