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“Caledonia”, at the Edinburgh festival, does less than justice to its subject

THE foolhardy attempt by the Scots to establish a foreign colony of their own at Darien on the isthmus of Panama in the 1690s has all the ingredients for a perfect drama. It reveals greed, ambition, ignorance, folly, suffering and forbearance, all washed with an essential nobility of spirit.

The venture would have circumvented attempts by the English king, William of Orange, to stop the Scots from playing their part in international trade. A new and exciting entity, a joint-stock company created by act of Parliament and financed by public subscription, would oversee the project. The Company of Scotland caught the national mood. No longer simply a business speculation, it became a patriotic crusade. ...

A bid to end slavery

The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s Circle Transformed Britain. By Stephen Tomkins. Lion Hudson; 272 pages; $16.95 and GBP10.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE group called the “Clapham Sect” is best known now for its contribution, under William Wilberforce’s leadership, to the campaigns for the abolition of the British slave trade and, ultimately, of slavery itself. It was a collection of evangelical, philanthropic families, spread across three generations, many of whom settled during the 1790s in Clapham, then a prosperous village just outside London. The name itself, given later, was a mild dig at their religious clannishness. A contemporary, the Rev Sydney Smith, had been sharper, calling them the “Clapham Church”. ...

A cartoon strip takes on the repatriation of treasures from the British Museum

“THE Stonehenge megaliths have been stolen!?” So exclaims Professor Munakata at the outset of a rollicking adventure set at the British Museum, in the form of a manga, or Japanese cartoon. Over the past five months, readers of Big Comic, a Japanese fortnightly magazine, have followed the exploits of the fictitious ethnographer as he gets embroiled in a bizarre plot to force the repatriation of the museum’s prized objects.

The strip, called “The Case Records of Professor Munakata”, was introduced 15 years ago by Yukinobu Hoshino, one of Japan’s most notable manga artists. Portly, bald and impeccably dressed with cap, cape and cane, the professor is Japan’s anti-Indiana Jones. He does not invite danger but bumbles into it. The strip does not follow any set formula but takes on serious issues. ...

Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant new novel studies the planet, happiness and marriage

Freedom. By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 576 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; GBP20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IT WAS John DeForest, a writer of the civil-war period, who defined the Great American Novel in an 1868 essay for the Nation as “painting the American soul within the framework of a novel”. DeForest was arguing over the relative merits of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, two writers who definitely fit the bill. Others have laid claim to the title (or had claim laid to it by their hopeful publishers), including J.D. Salinger, Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe and John Updike. ...

An account of the 20th-century exodus of millions of African-Americans

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson. Random House; 622 pages; $30. Buy from Amazon.com

THE words ring out on Sundays from pulpits in America’s inner cities as well as its Deep South: “We ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank the Lord God Almighty, we ain’t what we was.” Read Isabel Wilkerson’s account of the 20th-century exodus of millions of her fellow African-Americans from the states of the old Confederacy and the only possible response is “Amen!” ...

A complicated man, obsessed by his search for justice

Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends. By Tom Segev. Doubleday; 482 pages; $35. Jonathan Cape; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AMONG the 300,000 pieces of paper in Simon Wiesenthal’s private archive is a letter from a Holocaust survivor explaining why he had ceased to believe in God. In Tom Segev’s description: “God had allowed SS troops to snatch a baby from his mother and then use it as a football. When it was a torn lump of flesh they tossed it to their dogs. The mother was forced to watch. Then they ripped off her blouse and made her use it to clean the blood off their boots.” ...

A book laced with anecdotes from a New York Times reporter

Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. By Larry Rohter. Palgrave Macmillan; 304 pages; $27 and GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

POLITICAL strategists sometimes say that voters can hold only three things in their minds about a candidate. So candidates spend quite a bit of time determining what those three will be; once they have become known as a technophobe, an arugula muncher or a flip-flopper, the perception is hard to shift. The same might be true of countries. For Brazil, the three are forests, sex and football. ...

A guidebook with a delightful difference

Never Eat Shredded Wheat: The Geography We’ve Lost and How to Find it Again. By Christopher Somerville. Hodder & Stoughton; 240 pages; GBP12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

FOR Christopher Somerville, the age of Sat Nav and GPS is one of paradox. We are better than ever before at finding our way from A to B, but we know less and less about what’s in between. As we get better at navigating, we become lost in our own countries. The soothing screen of a Sat Nav system shows roads as thin, abstract strips striding through a featureless grey emptiness. Real life—the rivers, towns, caves, cliffs, bridges, battlefields, towers, cairns, factories and palaces that make up the world—is nowhere to be seen, and so the memory of it fades slowly from our collective consciousness. ...

A brilliant detective story asks what went wrong

Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream. By Francis Spufford. Faber & Faber; 434 pages; GBP16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

EVERYONE knows that economic central planning in the Soviet Union was a failure. Many people can make a stab at saying why. Few will expect to pick up a longish book on the topic by a non-economist and devour it almost at a sitting. But that is what you have in store with “Red Plenty”. It is part detective story—who or what is killing the Soviet economy?—and part a brilliantly clear explanation of some very intricate history and economics. Some of the characters are real, some invented. Everyone has words put into their mouths. ...

By Robert Sackville-West who benefited from the tradition of male primogeniture

Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles. By Robert Sackville-West. Walker; 320 pages; $26. Bloomsbury; GBP20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

GREAT houses and families don’t come much greater than Knole and the Sackvilles. Robert Sackville-West tells their story, lightly and clearly, tracking the house (365 bedrooms, 52 staircases) as it zigzags down the generations, from 1604 when Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, Lord Treasurer to Elizabeth I and James I, bought the freehold, to the time when the author and his family moved in. ...

A documentary film about a village that succeeds eventually in saving its trees

CLOSE to the West Bank’s border with Israel lies Budrus, a tiny village. Israel’s “separation barrier” is planned to swerve and dip around the village, biting off chunks of the villagers’ land; their olive trees will be torn up. “Budrus”, a documentary film produced by a Palestinian and an Israeli (which will be on general release in Britain next month and in America in October), follows the villagers’ largely peaceful demonstrations against the barrier.

Though there is much anger in the village, there is little violence. Lines of people, shouting their frustration, try to protect their trees and save their land. Non-violent protest is in the Palestinians’ best interest, says Ayed Morrar, the organiser of the demonstrations. “We want to raise our kids in peace and hope,” he says, speaking in Hebrew, no doubt in the hope that some Israelis will hear him. ...

A book that takes an uncliched look at Japanese society today

Contemporary Japan: History, Politics and Social Change Since the 1980s. By Jeff Kingston. Wiley-Blackwell; 328 pages; $89.95. Buy from Amazon.com

THE modern image of Japan is built on shaky foundations. In the 1980s nearly all Japanese considered themselves middle class. Other abiding beliefs include companies looking after workers through lifetime employment and the yakuza, Japan’s mafia, being guardians of the lost samurai spirit. There is some truth in all this but, as with other national myths, their real importance is in what they reveal about those who hold them dear. ...

A collection of pleasingly quirky essays

Book of Days: Personal Essays. By Emily Fox Gordon. Spiegel & Grau; 320 pages; $15. Buy from Amazon.com

“TO CALL oneself a born essayist seems implicitly ironic,” writes Emily Fox Gordon about three-quarters of the way through her book, “like calling oneself a born dowager or a born eminence grise.” Ms Gordon likes to be gently coy about the profession she happened on in middle age, casting her eyes down as if she were a pacifist or a vegetarian. But it is all part of a game. Behind her lashes Ms Gordon knows full well that she has the heart of a hunter; she has been firing with both barrels since page one. ...

The life and words of Mr Peanut

Mr Peanut. By Adam Ross. Random House; 352 pages; $29.95. Jonathan Cape; GBP16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THERE is a perverse romance to Adam Ross’s debut novel, “Mr Peanut”. This is a book about love. Or, rather, it’s about how love’s honey glow dims with time, after years of compromise and routine. That means it’s about marriage, its lonelinesses and gloom, and the way longing for freedom from its prison can inspire thoughts of murder. Or perhaps it is a thriller, about men who love their wives but kill them, or simply wish they were dead. But at the root of it all is love, that most absurd and precious thing, and how hard it is to make it stay. ...

Travels of an adventurer socialist

Wolf: The Lives of Jack London. By James L. Haley. Basic Books; 364 pages; $29.95 and GBP17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

CHILD LABOURER, deckhand, gold prospector, hobo, and then forever a writer. And what a writer. Jack London was a hack who knocked out 1,000 words a day. His unceasing output fell into several categories: potboilers, high-calibre adventure novels, journalism (he served as a foreign correspondent for William Randolph Hearst during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05), and political screeds. He was America’s first great West Coast writer and his love for the Pacific Ocean marked him out from the East Coast authors of his day. ...

Eyes across borders

A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle. By Raja Shehadeh. Profile; 256 pages; GBP12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

UNPICKING family histories, digging around for relatives long forgotten, is irresistible. For a people like the Palestinians, clinging to their history, desperate to keep their story from being erased, it is still more urgent. In his new book Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and writer, chases the trail of his great-great uncle Najib, a journalist living in the Palestine of the Ottoman empire who, having told the authorities of his opposition to the Ottoman entry into the first world war, received a death sentence for his troubles. He was then forced to go into hiding for three years. ...

Why it started in Britain

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. By William Rosen. Random House; 400 pages; $28. Jonathan Cape; GBP20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“REVOLUTION” is an overused word; the latest footling change often hyped into the biggest revolution since the last one. But in the case of the industrial revolution, the mechanical transformation of Britain, and later Europe, during the 18th and 19th centuries, it is entirely justified. William Rosen, an American former editor and publisher, ranks it alongside the invention of agriculture as one of the two most important developments in history. ...

Sexual renegade, gay icon and tattoo artist

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. By Justin Spring. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 496 pages; $32.50. Buy from Amazon.com

BY THE time the rioting drag queens at New York’s Stonewall Inn ushered in what many fondly consider the dawn of gay liberation in 1969, Samuel Steward was 60 years old. Any other gay man of his time, raised by three spinster aunts in small-town Ohio, might well have stayed in self-loathing denial for ever. Steward, however, in those innocent days when the very concept of a homosexual was but dimly known, found little trouble in getting the other boys to accept him as, in his words, “a dandy substitute for their girls”. When he left the town at 17 he had already committed enough sexual crimes to earn him, in his own laconic reckoning, “total incarceration in Ohio: between five and six thousand years.” ...

Two books look at the touchy subject of Muslim attitudes to Jews

In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands. By Martin Gilbert. Yale University Press; 320 pages; GBP25 and $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. By Gilbert Achcar. Metropolitan Books; 400 pages; $30. Saqi; GBP25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk ...

Darkly funny, “Life During Wartime” may prove an unexpected indie hit

TODD SOLONDZ, the writer-director of “Life During Wartime”, has always liked risky subjects. After his pitch-black comedy, “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, took top honours at the Sundance film festival in 1996, his next film, “Happiness”, was rejected by its own distributor for portraying a child rapist as a human being. Obviously, Mr Solondz was never going to be New Jersey’s answer to Woody Allen.

His new film is an affecting sequel to “Happiness”. It downplays the grotesque humour of the original. The paedophile ex-con, Bill Maplewood, is back, played this time with unexpected gravitas by Ciaran Hinds, along with his chipper ex-wife, Trish, and her sisters, Joy and Helen. ...