We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews:
Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times)
‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’
Virginia Blackburn on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Sunday Express)
‘The main problem with this ridiculous book is that Jeanette clearly thinks that her opinions and feelings about everything are totally fascinating whereas to the rest of us she comes across as self-obsessed, self-indulgent and with an ego the size of a planet. Whatever Mrs W did to her in childhood certainly didn’t harm her self-belief.’
Jenny Diski on Deceit and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers (Guardian)
‘I wasn’t surprised to discover that he is on prescription antidepressants, as well as using ganja and cocaine … There will be Iron Johns who read this book and cheer, and although he explains that each sex contains both male and female genes, my male genes are just too wimpy to find any charm in Trivers’s display of self-disclosure – machismo and pet peeves – dressed up as an important new evolutionary understanding of humanity.
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