Books round up

ASLS

John Corbett and Bill Findlay, eds

This excellent volume contains five classic plays in Scots translation, ranging from Robert Kemp's Molire in the 1940s to Peter Arnott's Brecht in the 1990s.

The great virtue of such an undertaking is the extent to which a Scots version can reveal aspects of the original lost in a standard rendering.

For example, we have Douglas Young's Aristophanes, recapturing some of the exuberant wordplay and wildly diverse registers of the Athenian original, and Victor Carin's adaptation of the Venetian demotic of Carlo Goldoni.

Rather than appearing a dry academic exercise, these plays crackle with vigour.

Also try: James Robertson, Fae the Flouers o Evil

URBAN GRIMSHAW AND THE SHED CREW

Bernard Hare

Sceptre

The Shed Crew were a group of problematic children on a Leeds estate in the 1990s who were befriended by Hare. Their lives - children and author alike - revolved around drugs, petty crime, alcohol, sex, and hating paedophiles and the police.

I waited for the author to question his own motives, and instead watched him vacillate between self-pity and self-justification. That these children were failed, and that Hare tried to help, is not in question. Whether railing at capitalism, taking heroin in their presence or inventing a hokum religion are efficacious solutions, I leave to the reader.

Dave Pelzer, for all his faults, at least profited from his own misery, not others'.

Try instead: Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards

DEATH BY DESIGN

Ronnie Scott

B&W

It is probably best to read this little guide to the Glasgow Necropolis while actually walking around the "first garden cemetery in Scotland". The author conducts tours of the Necropolis, and the book provides this in printed form: therein lies the problem. When he writes "In a few yards, you will see, to your left..." - well, I saw the side of the sofa, not a Charles Rennie Mackintosh gravestone. The absence of proper maps and the paucity of illustrations make it impossible to visualise the scene. And the "fact plus gag" format may work well as a performance, but it is grating on the page - and, in the case of suggesting currying the corpses of colonial nabobs, in rather poor taste.

Also Try: Jan-Andrew Henderson, The Town Below the Ground