Book reviews in brief

Published on Wednesday 24 June 2009 14:53

THE OLD DEVIL BY DONALD MCRAE (Simon & Schuster, £18.99)

IN THE career of Clarence Darrow, the advocate's calling attained heroic heights. Not necessarily admirable (as McRae's title suggests, his subject had flaws and to spare), but certainly heroic. Oxymoronic it may be, but between 1924 and 1926 he played the lead in no fewer than three "Trials of the Century", waging his own doughty war for justice – and modernity. Having defended the indefensible, saving sadistic thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb from the electric chair, he assaulted the citadels of benightedness in the Scopes 'Monkey Trial'. Next he took on the forces of bigotry in that of Ossian Sweet, an African-American who had killed a man while fighting off a lynch-mob. But his supreme courtroom self-assurance came at quite a personal cost, as McRae shows in this utterly compelling life.

THE RESISTANCE

BY MATTHEW COBB

(Simon & Schuster, 17.99)

REPORTS of French resistance under the Nazi occupation were in many ways an exaggeration: 98 per cent of the population took no part. So it's by no means entirely unfair, Cobb acknowledges, that writers should have preferred to focus on the meekness of the many. To read this riveting history of the Resistance is, paradoxically, to see how eminently understandable such mass passivity was, though it's also to appreciate the astounding courage of the men and women who stood out. But this is no nostalgic return to the old romantic myths: Cobb is completely in tune with the zeitgeist in his appreciation of how complex, even messy, the motivations and the issues were. Some fought more for the Comintern than for France; many were trying to avoid transportation as forced labour. One way and another, though, the Resistance refused to capitulate in the face of fear and repression – a heroic struggle in anyone's book.

THE LINK

BY COLIN TUDGE AND JOSH YOUNG

(Little, Brown, 18.99)

Senior to "Lucy" by some 44 million years, Ida emerged from the oil shales of Messen, Germany, recently – a lemur-like, squirrel-sized early primate. Her perfect state of fossil preservation is a miracle in itself; still more extraordinary are her implications for the science of human evolution. This book is not just a wonderfully readable account of Ida's discovery and its immediate significance: it raises much wider questions about what being human means.