Empire of Blue Water: Henry Morgan and the Pirates Who Ruled the Caribbean Waves,

by Stephan Talty;

Simon & Schuster, 2008, $24.95.

In 1654, a man called Thomas Gage travelled to Portsmouth to step aboard the Fagons, a ship on a mission from God. This renegade Dominican turned informer had, in his Catholic days, spent twelve years in the West Indies as a missionary, and had written a best-seller based on his experiences which persuaded Oliver Cromwell to take on the Spanish in the New World. Gage convinced the Lord Protector that the Pope’s plans for universal domination could only be countered by a staunch Protestant invasion of Hispaniola as part of a grand “Western Design”.

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism,

by Michael Burleigh;

Harper Press, 2008, £25.

From all that terror teaches,

From lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches,

That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation,

Of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation,

Deliver us, good lord!

            —G.K. Chesterton, “A Hymn” (1915)

In this painstakingly researched book, Michael Burleigh examines most of the versions of terrorism of the last two centuries. From Ireland he makes his way via the nineteenth-century Russian nihilists and revolutionaries, and then the anarchists, to the weird spoilt-brat Marxists of continental Europe a few decades back. He looks at some of the terrorists who featured in the dismantling of the great European empires. One cannot do it all, and, sadly, there is nothing on the Mau Mau or on Eoka. There is, however, a chilling account of the destruction of French Algeria, a country standing in its late days on the verge of economic modernity.

Baldo: Volume 1 Books I-XII, Volume 2 Books XIII-XXV  by Teofilo Folengo, translated by Ann E. Mullaney. Harvard University Press, 2007, 2008, each volume $29.95.

When the Benedictine monk Teofilo Folengo forsook cowl and habit—so the story goes—he took to wandering about Italy in the company of a young lady of society. Given his talent in dipping a nib into the blackest of inkpots to form well-turned verses in the Virgilian mode he staved off poverty and hunger by calling upon the lumpiest of muses to “ply their poet with macaroni and give him five platters, or eight, full of polenta”.

Our Shared Japan: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry,edited by Irene de Angelis & Joseph Woods. Dedalus Press, 2007, 20 euros.

The word anthology means, literally, a “collection of flowers”. This one was launched to mark fifty years of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Japan. The book contains many haiku and tanka, poems that need to be taken in sushi-type bites.

Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China by Simon Winchester. Viking, 2008, $32.95.

One of the great synoptic works of developmental biology is a three-volume work that was published by Cambridge University Press in 1931. Over 2000 pages long, Chemical Embryology provides not only an exhaustive account of changes in the embryo and placenta (osmotic pressure, pH, respiratory gradients, metabolic processes) but a descriptive history of the egg from its earliest mythic beginnings.

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey. John Murray, 2008, $33.

“Welcome to L.A. City of contradictions,” the blurb greets you. Like “Welcome to the Valley of the Tweed, Valley of Contrasts”, but a bit snappier, perhaps. Not that 500 pages of contradictions is that snappy, though some of the pages contain a lot of white space and just a few lines about the history of Los Angeles. This is clearly meant to be the portrait of a city. What Balzac and Victor Hugo did for Paris, and Dickens for London. Now it is Los Angeles’ turn.