Non-fiction round-up

Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Future of Music
by John Alderman (Fourth Estate, £7.99)

"CDs are too expensive," say music-lovers, "so we're entitled to download the stuff for free instead." Oh, so it's OK to steal a new Porsche because, hey, Porsches should be cheaper. "The major record labels rip off the artists anyway." Yes, but not paying for their work at all rips off the artists a whole lot more.

Alderman's useful narrative of MP3s and the Napster court case collects opinions on these matters from industry executives and artists such as Ice-T and Robert Fripp. It's an unstylish read, lacking any great attempt to sort through the arguments; the strength is its documentary drive.

The real villains of the story are the major labels, who recently blamed "piracy" for a slump in revenue, forgetting that they have been writing off amusingly large misinvestments in the likes of Mariah Carey - and that the zenith of Napster activity was also the year in which the record industry made its biggest profits ever. Steven Poole

Serendipities: Language and Lunacy
by Umberto Eco (Phoenix, £6.99)

Hypothesis: there is a "force of the false" that drives history. Erroneous beliefs in gods inspired the invention of theatre and the expansion of civilisations; mistakes about the size of the earth led directly to the "discovery" of America by Columbus.

But falsity also has a dark side, as exampled by the Rosicrucian myths that fomented anti-semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Eco's succeeding essays romp splendidly through Babel myths, a cabbalistic reading of Dante, hieroglyphs and the I Ching, and dreams of a universal language. This is vintage minor Eco, in that it is a casually brilliant demonstration of interdisciplinary scholarship, glued together with amazingly trite theories. People act on wrong beliefs and then do good or bad things? Uh, yes, so what's new? There is also his habit of making highly dubious statements (eg about Borges) that non-superstar academics would at least have to argue for a few lines. SP

Mirror, Mirror: Confessions of a Plastic-Surgery Addict
by Terry Prone (Sitric, £7.99)

The author survived a car crash that caved in large portions of her face, and had reconstructive plastic surgery. She found she enjoyed it so much that she kept going back for ever more cosmetic elective procedures.

She has had two facelifts, a brow-lift and an arm-lift, laser resurfacing of her skin, liposuction, Botox injections, a tummy-tuck, tooth implants, eye surgery... you name it.

Hang on, back up there. What on earth's an arm-lift? Glad you asked. That's when they slice off loose skin from your upper arms and fold it back together nice and tight. Yum. Some people might prefer to take up a gym subscription, but not Prone, who offers witty, gross-out descriptions of her operations, thus performing a useful service for those considering surgical self-improvement. She writes in a beautifully disarming style, and seems devoid of either narcissism or self-pity. Her money, I guess. As she says, "Whatever turns you on..." SP

The Trial of Henry Kissinger
by Christopher Hitchens (Verso, £8)

Though the filthy secrets of US foreign policy that Hitchens uncovers are depressing, the book as a whole is cause for optimism: it's a victory for free speech, and for the Americans' enviable Freedom of Information legislation.

Drawing on declassified documents, memoirs and interviews, Hitchens argues persuasively that Kissinger, from the sabotaged 1968 Vietnam peace talks through Chile, Cyprus and East Timor, has been a war criminal, a suborner of murder and kidnapping, and an inveterate liar. Hitchens's more speculative "it seems possible" accusations, such as that involving the assassination of a Greek journalist, tend to weaken the focus on the large and so far unanswered charges.

But this is a quibble. One of the best recommendations for the book is Conrad Black's hysterical review: "It is so contemptible that it almost makes a case for judicial book burning." Contemptible, eh? That's what Kissinger called it, too. We notice you didn't say "false". SP

In the Name of Justice
by Anthony Hayward (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Though best known for the impact of his films about southeast Asia, John Pilger has fronted a wide range of documentaries, ranging from droll dispatches from the US to a landmark indictment of the UK's arms trade.

It is possible to catch oneself being blasé as ITV's annual Pilger polemic arrives on screen, knowing that western neo-colonialism is in for another hammering; the great virtue of this reverential study is that you see all the work together and can't fail to marvel at its scope and variety.

Hayward logs each programme's content and reviews, often describing the filming process and battles with regulators. Though useful, this approach prevents him raising more general questions. How does Pilger actually research his reports? Why has he virtually stopped covering UK domestic politics? What does he think of investigative pranksters like Michael Moore, who share his politics but not his severity? John Dugdale

A Double Thread
by John Gross (Vintage, £7.99)

Joining a distinguished list of literary grandees who have produced autobiographies in the past five years, the author, theatre critic and former TLS editor confines his memoir to his childhood as the son of a Mile End doctor, focusing on his "two separate but entwined legacies of being English and being Jewish".

Gross recalls a warm, colourful quasi-village in the 1930s and 40s, where few of his schoolmates or his father's patients were anti-semitic and the Krays and the Mitchell brothers had yet to link East Enders and gangsterism indissolubly in the public mind.

So mild is his backward gaze and so undramatic his boyhood - sexual awakening is only glimpsed in a "crush" on another lad and he primly "draws a veil" over unspecified excesses - that the book often verges on Pooteresque banality. But it livens up whenever he writes about cartoons, encyclopedias and crime novels, remembering not just what he read but his adolescent responses. JD

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