Book Reviews

Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather before feet were kicking pigs’ bladders. England vs Australia, first played in 1877, may be cricket’s iconic series, but the Ashes cedes ten years of history to the contest between Argentina and Uruguay — the rivalry of the River Plate. In Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion, James Coyne and Timothy Abraham, cricket journalists with a fondness for Latin America, travel from Mexico to Argentina with bat in rucksack and dates with fusty archives. A social history with elements of travelogue, the book tells a story of new horizons and false

The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could do worse than to begin with the song ‘Why do the birches rustle so loudly in Russia?’ By the patriotic band called Lube — apparently Putin’s favourite — it’s a melancholic guitar ballad that also mentions the soul, accordions, suffering, falling leaves, an old woman waving goodbye, and a beloved woman (rodnaya) ‘my own’, from the same root as rodina, motherland. It also happens to be sung by a handsome young village policeman. Na zdarovya! A shot of birch kitsch at its most potent. As Tom Jeffreys mentions in his

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention. The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived

At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to tune their sitars and tablas. ‘If you appreciated the tuning so much,’ Shankar said, half in jest, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy the music even more.’ To the untrained ear, Indian music may sound unmelodious and directionless as it strays into apparent pre-concert tuning registers and monotony. Nonetheless, its transcendental Zen-like qualities impressed Richard Wagner, who was drawn to the spirituality and joss-stick mysticism (as he saw it) of the east. A devotional song performed by the Punjab Sufi vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan can soar as ecstatically as Parsifal. Indeed

‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi occupying forces in the ancient town of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, had forced the Jewish community to assemble in the square. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women suddenly attacked their persecutors, scratching, biting and hurling stones. Stunned by this unexpected defiance, the Nazi soldiers fled. The influence of such courageous acts of resistance was tremendous. Galvanised by largely left-wing youth activists and connected by mainly female couriers, Jewish defence groups were soon staging armed attacks and operations across occupied Poland. Judy Batalion’s

What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there have been no decent books making sense of Covid-19. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour. He offers several answers — and none of them is comforting. For most of human history, viruses were unexceptional — hard to research, because no one thought them remarkable. When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, we’d rush into quarantine,