Paperbacks

It seems incredible now that John Lennon was once seen as a threat to world peace, but that’s just how he was regarded by President Nixon and the FBI, as Jon Wiener reveals in Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Faber #163;9.99). Wiener sets out to portray Lennon first as the Beatle who shocked the Pope by declaring that “those guys with hair in their eyes” were more popular than Jesus Christ, and then as the radical superstar who sent shivers of fear through President Nixon because of the way his protests against the war in Vietnam were infecting the youth of America.

When Wiener began his research shortly after Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota Hotel in Manhattan on December 8 1980, he discovered that the FBI had a huge hoard of papers on the former Beatle. He was allowed to see one-third of these files - weighing 26 lbs - but the rest is still firmly under lock and key. Why? Wiener, whose book first appeared in 1984, is still trying to find out. Was Lennon really such a danger to American security? We shall never know, but Wiener provides a fascinating perspective on the voice behind both “Twist and Shout” and “John Sinclair”.

The legendary aura surrounding John Lennon makes the task of disentangling truth from myth well-nigh impossible. Antoine de Saint-Exupery is another character whose real personality lies buried beneath a welter of images - daring pilot, desert explorer and author of the magical Le petit prince. In reality he was a hopeless aviator and an infuriating man; but no matter. His autobiographical accounts of his miraculous survival after crash-landing in Libya - Wind, Sand and Stars - and of his experience of war - Flight to Arras (both reissued by Penguin at #163;4.99 each) - are a marvellous read.

Over the last 10 years, an average of 57 murderers a year have been released from their life-sentences, and allowed back into the community on special licence. Tony Parker interviewed 12 of them to find out what Life After Life was like. His book (HarperCollins #163;5.99) provides some fascinating insights: Parker never intrudes himself but gives his subjects the chance to speak for themselves, seamlessly editing his interviews so that you feel as if you are listening in on a private conversation.

While Parker refrains from commenting on the people he has talked with, David Canter’s job is to interpret; to provide a psychological profile of the rapist, the murderer, the serial killer. In Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer (HarperCollins #163;5.99), this professor of psychology explains his work with the police from the days in 1985 when Scotland Yard looked with suspicion on him and his approach to solving crimes to the advent of a crime series on television, Cracker, which stars not a detective but a forensic psychiatrist (played by Robbie Coltrane).

The writer and poet Elizabeth Smart had no scruples about providing an in-depth profile of herself and of her troubled relationship with George Barker, with whom she fell in love via a book of his poems that she found in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

In the second volume of her journals, On the Side of the Angels, edited by Alice Van Wart (Flamingo #163;5.99), she writes, “And yet I must put it all down because of all the other drowning women”. What illuminates these daily outpourings is her own acute awareness of the absurdity of her situation; what makes them so poignant is her inability to break free from the tangled web of love.

If, like me, you have been looking for a book that can explain why the world is in recession and when, or whether, it will ever end, then look no further than Paul Ormerod’s The Death of Economics (Faber #163;6.99). A professional economist, he attacks the current schools of economic thought: according to him they are outdated, idealised and based on false claims to “scientific” status. Instead he goes back to basics in gauging our national prosperity, the links between unemployment and inflation, and the pros and cons of the ERM.