Sex, walkie-talkies & rock'n'roll

Steven Poole and John Dugdale on Faith, God & Rock'n'Roll | The Girl from the Fiction Department | Hello World | British Hit Singles | A Secret History of the IRA | Ready, Steady, Go!

Faith, God & Rock'n'Roll by Mark Joseph (Sanctuary, £9.99)

Evanescence, ensconced as I write at the top of the pop charts, used to be part of the Christian rock or, as they say, heaven-metal community, but are now repudiating that label: the cunningly vague lyrics of their single "Back to Life" may refer to Jesus, or just to a lover. In his interesting tour d'horizon of spirituality in rock, the author has interviewed acts with explicitly Christian lyrical themes - San Diego band POD don't sleep with their groupies, singer Jessica Simpson won't have sex before marriage, they all set a good example to the kids - but none of them wants to be known as a "Christian band" either. Then there are the celebrities such as Destiny's Child (none of them drinks), Bono of U2 (apparently "God walked through the room" during the recording of All That You Can't Leave Behind), and even Alice Cooper, who on giving up alcohol suddenly realised: "I didn't need another supermodel." Now that's asceticism. SP

The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Penguin, £6.99)

More fuel for the Orwell centenary roadshow, this biography of Sonia Brownell, whom George married on his deathbed and who became his literary executor, attempts to correct its subject's reputation for being a manipulative gold-digger. Instead, it says here, she was brave, talented, beautiful, loyal, et cetera; although judging by the extracts Spurling uses she was no writer. Sonia, as the book rather cloyingly calls her, was however marvellously rude, with a habit of spitting whenever she passed nuns in the street, and the book provides a nice watercolour sketch of the intellectual and artistic milieu of the times: working at Cyril Connolly's Horizon, hanging out in Paris with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (with whom she had an affair, and who apparently liked to go clubbing with AJ Ayer). The story ends unhappily in near-destitution, but Spurling insists that her subject never lost her "magical radiance", whatever that might be. SP

Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre (Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95)

There may be some hip youngsters who, having never known a world without modern technology, imagine that ham radio is some sort of walkie-talkie for superintelligent pigs. This will show them: it's a history of amateur radio, pegged to the biography of a particular operator named Jerry Powell, but eventually constituting a global history of a pre-internet democratic communications culture. There are reproductions of 300 QSL cards - postcards exchanged by hams as physical confirmation that contact has taken place, many of which are marvels of inventive typography and witty imagery. The book also explains all the technical wizardry and abstruse lingo; lists famous hams such as Marlon Brando, Richard Feynman and King Hussein; and explains how the ham infrastructure may still provide an essential fallback during an emergency-induced communications blackout. An exquisitely produced labour of love. SP

British Hit Singles edited by David Roberts (Guinness World Records, £15.99)

The 16th edition of the indispensably poptastic reference work includes a review of the year 2002 - the year that, lest we forget, brought us the life-enhancing crooning of the Pop Idol contestants, the avant-garde genius of Enrique Iglesias and Las Ketchup, the world-conquering hips of Shakira, and of course the Cheeky Girls, whom we should pass over in silence. New features scattered throughout the main body of text include "The Story Behind the Song", explaining the genesis of hits such as "Mack the Knife", "Jealous Guy", "Blue Monday" or "Justified and Ancient", with quotes from the musicians; and a useful map, for geographically minded pop anoraks, of UK place names featured in songs (though, meanly, it excludes London, promising that for a future edition). I especially like the fictitious entry used to explain the listings information, and can't imagine why there hasn't yet been a real band called Karaoke Knife Attack. SP

A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney (Penguin, £8.99)

Previous chronicles of the way the Troubles were brought to an end have concentrated on the high-level negotiations of the Major and Blair years; Moloney's stated aim is to probe further back and deeper, exploiting his unrivalled republican contacts to chart the changes within the IRA and Sinn Fein that made the ceasefire possible. As much an unauthorised biography of Gerry Adams as a secret history of the Provisionals, his formidably well-researched book views the Sinn Fein leader (and, it asserts, long-standing IRA army council member) with ambivalence: on the one hand a political giant who launched and drove the peace process; on the other a cunning operator, capable of breathtaking deceptions and volte-faces as he took control of the organisation and realigned it. Alongside Moloney's expert tracing of hidden seismic shifts, other studies seem only to have scraped the surface of Northern Ireland's recent history. JD

Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool by Shawn Levy (Fourth Estate, £7.99)

The author of Rat Pack Confidential adapts its group biography approach to evoking Cool Britannia Mark 1 - the period between 1963 and 1967 when grey, hidebound England startled itself by setting trends in popular culture that the rest of the world followed. Convinced that by "laying these lives alongside one another, you could open up an entire time", he picks as his key figures David Bailey, Vidal Sassoon, Mary Quant, Terence Stamp, Brian Epstein, Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser; there is also a vast and exotic secondary cast of models, lovers, boutique owners, boozers, bohemians, tripping toffs and freeloaders. Although Levy's Tom Wolfe-like immersion in the detail of the period is impressive, only three of his septet's survivors have talked to him - and the difference between cuttings-job and first-hand encounter is unmistakable in his excellent interview with Stamp. JD

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