Book reviews: Retromania | Stop What You’re Doing And Read This! | Pure | Don’t Shoot

William Leith reviews this week’s paperback releases

Retromania

by Simon Reynolds

(Faber, £10.99)

RAting: ****

For a long time, Simon Reynolds has been pretty much the most intelligent commentator on pop music around. Here, with rare brilliance, he investigates why, as a culture, pop is becoming so obsessed with the past. Think, he says, of Lady Gaga, the White Stripes and Amy Winehouse. The past is somehow cutting-edge. But why? Because of digital culture, of course. The past used to be out of reach; now it’s there, at the click of a mouse. And, he says, it’s changing the way we understand the present. An excellent book, and not just about pop music.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

By David M Kennedy

(Vintage, £4.99)

Rating: ****

Reading, says the academic Maryanne Wolf, in this book of essays by various authors about reading, is an extraordinary thing. Our brains are not hard-wired to read. But, over the past few centuries, they have learned to improvise. To understand reading is to understand what an awesome thing the human brain is. But is the way we read under threat? Nicholas Carr thinks it might be. Is the modern world asking us to read in a different way? To put this in context, Socrates worried about printed text in the same way that we worry about the internet. Absolutely fascinating, with contributions from Blake Morrison, Zadie Smith, Carmen Callil, Jeanette Winterson and Michael Rosen among others.

Pure

by Andrew Miller

(Sceptre, £8.99)

Rating: *****

Paris, 1785. The revolution looms It’s a place full of pomposity, arrogance and filth. You can feel the energy – and see just why it was voted Costa Book of the Year last week. In fact, you can almost smell the pungency of the place: think of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. Into the city comes our hero, Jean-Baptiste Barratte, an engineer from Normandy. Summoned to the palace at Versailles, Barratte is asked to perform a horrible task – to get rid of a big cemetery in the middle of town, bodies and all. He accepts. He excavates, taking us deep into the city’s putrid history.

Don’t Shoot

by David M Kennedy

(Bloomsbury, £12.99)

Rating: ***

If you want to read a book on urban gangs and find out why they exist and why they kill each other, read this. Kennedy describes himself as “not a cop, not an academic, not anything”. Actually, he’s a scholar of inner-city America. He’s meticulous and insightful. He’s also a very good writer: this is a sociology book, but it’s like immersing yourself in The Wire. Kennedy gets behind the stereotypes of cops and criminals and tries to figure out why so many gangsters are killing each other. It’s not really about money: it’s about “beefs” - disputes over respect and territory. When Kennedy says something, you believe him.