And now for some edifying entertainment. Internationally published author and critic Antonella Gambotto-Burke snaffles the best books of the month ...

ID: THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN THE 21st CENTURY
Susan Greenfield
One of the most interesting anthropological analyses to be published in years, ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century proposes that individuality has never been more threatened. The combined forces of technology and fundamentalism are gradually homogenizing our culture. “Noone would deny that children are indeed living in looser family ‘networks', as the adults in their lives divorce, remarry, or cohabit with others who themselves have children from previous relationships,” Greenfield writes. “But on top of that, the current way of life is opening up previously unpredictable scenarios, such as the possible negligence of erstwhile high-achieving, professional parents now frustrated by the slow pace of a home life that is the inevitable consequence of supervising the very young.” Greenfield is no prose stylist, but presents her important argument in a straightforward manner. Essential reading.

THE BOLTER
Frances Osborne
The story of Idina Sackville, White Mischief 's notorious seductress, the inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character The Bolter, and the woman who scandalized 1920s Society by marrying five times, is told by her great-granddaughter, who suspends judgment by addressing context. “Heavy drinking began from noon with pink gins at the course side or in the Muthaiga's bars,” Osborne writes. “Gin fizzes saw out the afternoon until teatime, when sundowners of ferocious spirit blends kicked in. every evening there was a ball, for which the female guests had to wear a different outfit every night – and they dressed to kill, glittering with Paris silks and family jewels from some of the grandest houses in Europe .” Whilst Osborne's strength is not behavioral analysis, she certainly succeeds in telling a story as riveting – and ideologically deplorable – as the best airport fiction.

RAISING BABIES
Steve Biddulph
Steve Biddulph, whose books have sold in their millions in 27 languages, deserves all the success he has and more. The author of Raising Boys, Manhood, and The Secret of Happy Children, Biddulph, a psychologist, weighs in with his best work to date, Raising Babies . As he points out, surely we can emancipate women without abandoning babies to indifferent care? “There have always been families where closeness is not practiced and it's easy to condemn this as selfish and heartless,” he writes. “A more realistic explanation is that if one does not receive loving care in childhood, one simply may not understand what such care feels like, or how much it matters.” One of the most important books ever written about child-rearing.

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE
G. K. Chesterton
KING SOLOMON'S MINES
H. Rider Haggard
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Robert Louis Stevenson
THE LOST WORLD
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The ravishingly repackaged Best Adventure Stories Ever series is Headline's answer to the question that should be posed by all those who sit on the sofa with glazed eyes as they aim a remote control at the television: “How can I make better use of the short amount of time I have left on this planet?” The Man Who Was Thursday features the Central Anarchist Council (whose ambition is to destroy the world order) and Gabriel Syme, the dashing undercover Scotland Yard man who strives to derail them. King Solomon's Mines is an entirely different affair, the quintessential adventure too often marred by inept schoolteachers, and a thrilling journey into the darkest reaches of an Africa that gripped Victorian England by the throat. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Robert “Treasure Island” Louis Stevenson produced the blueprint for just about every terrifyingly fractured personality in late 20th century fiction (“I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disorded sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul,”). Long before Michael Crichton escorted us to Jurassic Park, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the dinosaur-busy Lost World (“It boiled and heaved with strange life. Great slate-colored backs and high serrated dorsal fins shot up with a fringe of silver, and then rolled down into the depths again,”). It is impossible to choose between these four superlative works, which is why you must buy the set for that one person in your life who has an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with inanimate objects.

WASTED
Mark Johnson
Once homeless and addicted to crack, ex-con Mark Johnson was the kind of man many of us address as an unattractive or unfortunate object. (The kind of unrelenting torment he experienced as a child rarely has any other ending.) “I know how he feels,” he writes of his brother. “Guilty because when Dad hits you then you know you've done something bad and it must be your fault. Miserable because you love Dad and he doesn't want your love.” Johnson, who now owns a successful tree surgery business, employing and helping other recovering addicts, wrote Wasted as a means of inspiring others. In this respect and others, he has more than succeeded.

THE WOMEN'S ROOM
Marilyn French
Marilyn French is one of the few authors familiar with the disorienting pleasure of selling 20 million copies of their first novel and having it become a classic of feminist literature. “She moved through the evening like a sleepwalker,” she writes. “She sat in the family room while the boys watched television and didn't even turn it off when they went to bed, just sat there, and the news came on and people were still talking about Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, and everyone thought they were dead, and that roused her.” French's clean American prose is a pleasure to read, as are her caustic – and sometimes debatable - insights. Whether you agree with her or not, The Women's Room is necessary reading for all women and men interested in the inner lives of the women around them.

THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch
A 47-year-old computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy Pausch expected 100 or so students and colleagues to attend his last lecture on September 18, 2007, and was delighted when over 400 turned up to hear him speak. Over six million people have viewed the lecture online, and the resulting book is now on bestseller lists around the world. Pausch, the father of three and dying of pancreatic cancer, used his last lecture to impart the wisdom of his life, and the result is simply beautiful. “Men first walked on the moon during the summer of 1969,” he writes, “when I was eight years old. I knew then that pretty much anything was possible. It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams.” The perfect gift.

CREATING OUTDOOR ROOMS
Leeda Marting
For those of us without gardens, this gorgeously illustrated coffee-table hardback will have you considering the merits of converting your kitchen into a wilderness of willow and lavender in which sweet-smelling green ponds and blue butterflies flourish. “Candles must surely offer the most romantic lighting, whether indoors or outside,” Marting writes. “Create warmth and intimacy by adding soft candlelight with candelabras, lanterns, hurricanes and scones.” Plush, tapestry cushions, stone urns overflowing with ivy, shell planters, and neo-Roman water features: deliriously beautiful.

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?
Edited by Charles Pasternak
A biochemist and the founding Director of the Oxford International Biomedical Center , Professor Charles Pasternak asked some of the world's most brilliant thinkers how humanity can be defined. “Much of the extreme development of human culture, such as music, science, mathematics, and literature,” Sir Walter Bodmer, of the Cancer and Immunogenics Laboratory, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, writes, “may simply be a byproduct of our superior cognitive abilities, which were selected, not to make music or solve complex mathematical problems, but for our better survival and adaptation to rapidly changing environmental conditions.” A sweeping, intelligent, and absorbing exploration of humanity and human nature.

YOUR DAILY WALK WITH THE GREAT MINDS: WISDOM AND ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE PAST AND PRESENT
Richard A Singer, Jr.
Your Daily Walk with the Great Minds: Wisdom and Enlightenment of the Past and Present gives readers plenty of food for thought. The wisdom ranges from that of Picasso (“I do not look, I find,”) and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in life has a purpose,”) to Ben Stein (“I came to realize that a life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that is my duty,”). Every day of the year has a corresponding quote and meditation. The only flaw in this otherwise graceful book is a thoughtless association of the ego with “selfishness” - selfishness is not the product of ego, but of ego denied in childhood. An inspiring and constructive antidote to suffering, both emotional and physical.

DELETE THIS AT YOUR PERIL: ONE MAN'S FEARLESS EXCHANGES WITH THE INTERNET SPAMMERS
Bob Servant
Delete this at Your Peril is a very, very funny book. A log of sorts, it documents Bob Servant's crackpot exchanges with hapless internet scam artists, ranging from allegedly gerontophile Russian “brides” to Nigerians who are forced to pretend that they will be sending him leopards and lions. Glorious stuff.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: FIFTEEN JOURNEYS TO MOTHERHOOD
Suzy Zail
This valuable book offers readers fifteen very different windows into motherhood, and the glimpses are both arresting and deeply affecting (I wept at various points, too many). Read about the life of a commune mother, lesbian mothers, mothers with disabled children, a donor-egg recipient, disadvantaged mother, wealthy working mother, vision-impaired mother, relinquishing mother, adoptive mother, a grandmother who, because of her drug-addicted daughter, also plays the role of mother, and others. “It is harder to say goodbye to those taken away from homes steeped in domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, only to be returned there,” a foster mother notes. “A little piece of your heart gets ripped out each time.” Absolutely entrancing.

THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD: A MEMOIR OF SCHIZOPHRENIA
Elyn R. Saks
Professor of Law and Psychiatry at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Elyn R. Saks is not only happily married, but schizophrenic. In itself, her CV is a masterclass in defying expectation. But the problem rests in her understanding of her disturbance, which she comfortably classifies as an “illness”, thereby divesting others of responsibility for her emotional state. “One of my closest friends,” she writes, “was a man of great intelligence, about my age, who'd been struggling with his illness for years. Although his intelligence and capability seemed largely intact to me, he'd virtually relinquished any hope of achieving anything further in his life.” Any or all of the brilliant Alice Miller's works should be read before even contemplating The Centre Cannot Hold , which, despite its flaws, stands as an inspiring testament to human determination.

SPRINGTIME FOR GERMANY: OR HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE LEDERHOSEN
Ben Donald
British journalist Ben McDonald was determined to change Germany 's poor image, and the result is Springtime for Germany , a fantastically funny account of his adventures in the country of homeopathy, Goethe, and Nazism. “Speaking of gnomes, I had seen them everywhere,” he writes. “They seemed to be a national symbol of the German child-spirit. In one of those self-examining television debates about their national identity a studio audience of Germans was asked what they would do if guests presented them with a gift of a Gartenzwurg (garden gnome). The alternatives were (a) throw it away, (b) politely give it back, or (c) proudly take it and place it next to the others already in your garden. Seventy-five per cent of the audience chose the last option.” Whilst perhaps not completely succeeding in presenting Germany as a kind of Teutonic Disneyland, Donald has a wonderful eye for the absurd and an almost Victorian passion for adventure.

RAPE: A HISTORY FROM 1860 TO THE PRESENT
Joanna Bourke
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, Professor Joanna Bourke is regarded as one of the most original, well-versed and eloquent historians in the world. Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present analyses rape and rapists from a number of perspectives, and includes questions of tolerance and retribution. “[S]ome psychiatrists questioned the assumption that sex offenders were not like ‘other criminals' but possessed a particular psychology, were more likely to repeat their offence despite punishment and were especially dangerous to society,” she writes. “… [C]ircular reasoning characterized the entire approach: psychopaths were people who carried out violent crimes and they carried out these crimes because they were psychopaths.” Impeccable in both slant and research, Rape: A History is a valuable addition to the libraries of those who enjoy examinations of pathological behavior.

HOW NOT TO LOOK OLD: FAST AND EFFORTLESS WAYS TO LOOK 10 YEARS YOUNGER, 10 POUNDS LIGHTER, 10 TIMES BETTER
Charla Krupp
Try to ignore the awful purple-and-brown cover, in which Charla Krupp looks a little like an over-enthusiastic Playboy Bunny on annual leave: if you are over 30, and want to look hip, sexy, fresh, and pretty, How Not to Look Old is your book. Are you wearing an eyeglass chain around your neck, or submerging your face in a bath of foundation each morning? If so, stop immediately, as these are Bad Dating Behaviors (I refer, of course, not to courtship rituals, but to age-betraying habits). “We're paying attention only to your outer beauty, the package you present to the world. Think this is superficial? Sorry, but this is the real world. Every day, people size you up in a nanosecond, making judgments that could affect your future.” Neo-Playboy Bunny or not, Krupp has a point, and How Not to Look Old is a surprisingly engrossing and well-researched book.

HEALTHY ONE-DISH COOKING: 230 HEALTHY, FUSS-FREE RECIPES
Reader's Digest
If you are, like me, struggling to juggle parenthood with marriage and work, you need Healthy One-Dish Cooking like you need oxygen. Every book in the sturdy, timeless Reader's Digest series of cookbooks is replete with seductive photographs of food that you wish you were in the process of eating – all of it: Rice salad with prawns, Spicy chicken fajitas, Vegetarian paella, Salmon and pea pilaf, Prawn and spinach biryani, Thai-style chicken skewers … and it doesn't stop there. Each elegant recipe is presented in point format, and includes cook's tips and breakdown of fat, protein, and calories. One for bachelors who want to impress dates, and for women to whom time is a luxury.

CAN ANY MOTHER HELP ME? FIFTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP THROUGH A SECRET MAGAZINE
Jenna Bailey
In 1935, a young woman wrote to the women's magazine Nursery World : “Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbors. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books … I know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts and resentment. Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking' and cost nothing?” This young woman was overwhelmed with replies by mothers in the same position, and their response was to start a private magazine. Jenna Bailey presents the personal stories and deep friendships of this unusual collective of women with infinite tenderness. Can Any Mother Help Me? should be given to all mothers who wonder at their ability to cope.

YOUNG STALIN
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Those intrigued by monsters of history and the extremes of human nature will love Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin , in which the arch-conspirator and politically gifted escape-artist impresses Lenin to the degree that he makes Stalin – alongside Trotsky – his court favorite. “'I was so overcome by grief that my comrades took my gun away from me,' he later told a girlfriend. ‘I realized how many things in life I hadn't appreciated. While my wife was alive, there were times I didn't return home at night. I told her when I left not to worry about me but when I got home, she's be sitting there. She'd wait up all night.'” Fat with startling new evidence from international archives, Young Stalin is as detailed and intimate as the most engrossing novel. A superb read.

IN SEARCH OF REMARKABLE TREES: ON SAFARI IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
Thomas Pakenham
This profoundly eccentric volume documents Thomas Pakenham's desire to capture the singular truth of trees, to which he describes himself as “connected by some primitive, atavistic bond.” “From the shimmering salt-pans of Ntetwe in Botswana it's only half an hour's flight to the steamy swamps of the Okavango …” he writes. “The Delta was spread out below the plane's wing in the shape of a fan - or the frond of a fan palm – a hundred miles long. It's a primeval landscape where the wandering of the river owes nothing to man.” Such mesmerizing accounts are illustrated by Pakenham's photographs – of elephants in their element and giraffes, century-old avenues of planes, sifaka lemurs, and the commanding trees themselves, which rise from dust and pour from rocks. Just beautiful.

WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Lorna Martin
On the cusp of her 35th birthday, British journalist Lorna Martin realized that she had no chronological peers with whom she could share her predicament – that is to say, without partner, mortgage, or pet. Convinced that she is on the threshold of a collapse, she hires a therapist to help her rifle through her subconscious. “Yeah, Lorna,” a friend says. “It's a wonderful, life-affirming quote, but that's all it is … You are always going on about quotes and words and how wonderful they are. And they are, but remember you can play with them. you can put one in front of the other and make them say anything. You can hide behind words, but you can't hide from feelings. At least not forever. Think about it: you could say to someone I love you, I love you, I love you, or to yourself I love him, I love him, I love him, but it won't bring the feeling if it's not already there. People say things they don't mean all the time, especially in the heat of the moment. but actions and behavior always speak louder than words.” Wonderfully tragicomic and compelling, Martin's journey is one every single woman will want to share, if only on paper.

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