My books of the year

I've read some great new books this year, which have been illuminating and fascinating in equal measure. Here are my top five.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent

A fascinating social and political history of late 19th century and early 20th century America, Okrent takes us through the saloon bars of the midwest and the rise of temperance activism in the South, through connections with women's suffrage (which the brewers opposed) and the blackmailing of politicians to support the cause. We all know about the connections with gangsters like Al Capone, but this amazing book takes us through the role of Scottish distillers, Canadian bootleggers, Californian communion wine producers and fake rabbis in ensuring that America was kept fairly wet during the dry years. The cast of characters is wonderful, the account both scholarly and accessible. This US book is available from Amazon UK at £17.32.

Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

When the king of sanctimonious self-righteousness Julian Assange tells us that his leaks do no harm, he may reflect that if his revelations about Chinese movement on pulling the plug on the ghastly North Korean regime delay its inevitable occurence, he will have plenty of real lives on his hands. Barbara Demick brings the reality of life in the country to vivid life by talking to those who were fortunate enough to get out, usually to South Korea on a circuitous route through China. Their stories of hunger, medicine-free hospitals, unburied bodies in the street, frozen kindergartens and an ever present climate of fear are shocking because they are the tales of ordinary lives, and often of childhood illusions shattered. It is too easy to snigger at the ludicrousness of the North Korean leadership, but this book shows how serious its continued existence is to the lives of millions of people living in the Northern city of Chongin, well away from the relative prosperity of Pyongnang. The book is now in paperback.

The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour by Peter Mandelson

There were plenty of political books this year, and I greatly enjoyed Tony Blair's and Jonathan Powell's books. I also liked Steve Richards' account of the Brown years, as told by Ed Balls. But for me the best of them was Peter Mandelson's heavily reflective account of his ups and downs in the party and government. It is well-written and captures the internal struggles not only in the government, but in Mandelson's role in it. It also has a compelling honesty in recounting the major events of his life: I particularly enjoyed his accounts of the Kinnock years and the strange struggles that characterised the true origins of New Labour.

The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt

This is a great companion book to Francis Wheen's highly entertaining life of Karl Marx. Hunt tells the extraordinary story of Marx's patron and ideological foil, Friedrich Engels who took his reluctant embrace of Manchester capitalism to heart as he enjoyed a champagne lifestyle and became a keen hunter. The book is wonderful account of the relationship between Engels and Marx, the European political movements that led to Marxism and the personal traits that would lead their followers to embrace ideological purity as a virtue that would create so many 20th century monsters. Hunt tells the story with considerable panache, but underpinned by substantial original research. Although it was originally published in 2008, the paperback appeared for the first time in 2010.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada's tale of the everyday horror of life in Nazi Berlin is a rediscovered masterpiece. First published just after the war in Germany in 1947, it tells the fictional story of an ordinary couple whose son's death in the war provokes them into petty acts of defiance. These protests cause fury in the police and a determination to find the culprits. Fallada's cast of characters evoke a spirit of defiance, collaboration and compliance in the increasingly paranoid environment of the city, with the pace of a good thriller. The book was out of print for years until its reappearance in 2010 in an excellent translation by Michael Hoffman. Paperback.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

The story of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933 is an extraordinary piece of social and political history, and nobody tells it better than Daniel Okrent in a fantastic new book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, just published in the US and available in the UK via Amazon.

The prohibition lobby was closely linked in its early days both to the evangelical Christian right and the Ku Klux Klan and to women's suffragists, supporters of income tax and trade unionists, though by the time that the Catholic Al Smith became Democrat Presidential candidate in 1928 the former wing was much stronger. Their opponents in the drinks trade boxed themselves into a reactionary mode by rejecting these liberal causes, particularly women's suffrage, ensuring that women supported the alcohol ban by as much as 9-1.

But the impact of prohibition was profound on the US: not just the rise of organised crime through the Chicago bootleggers, but through changes to the fabric of American life in many ways from the growth of night clubs where women could drink through to the election of FDR and his ability to effect the New Deal. The cast of characters associated with the propagation of prohibition and its undermining was legion, and the second camp included most immigrant communities whose Democratic support was cemented at this stage, respectable Scottish distillers in cahoots with Canadian exporters and high society industrialists whose opposition led to repeal through to supporters of prohibition whose shameless blackmail of often 'wet' politicians has rarely been seen before or since.

Meanwhile, the number of legal and illegal ways of bypassing the law grew including: booze cruises outside an expanded 12 mile coastal limit, the growth of Havana, a new prosperity for the Bahamas, Cunard liners, legal farmhouse cider, communion and Jewish sacramental wine (creating a lucrative Californian vineyard replete with guesthouses for visiting priests and rabbis), alcohol for 'medicinal purposes', tonics for women (some created by leading drys), imports from Canada and various bootlegged and mixed versions of industrial alcohol. True, alcohol consumption fell, but the law was so widely flouted and created so much new crime that its repeal was inevitable.

Okrent tells this amazing story from the birth of the prohibitionists in radical politics through the growth of the Anti-Saloon league and its split opposition in distillers and brewers who couldn't agree among themselves on tactics through the movement of upper class women that finally led to repeal. It is one of the most readable and jaw-droppingly entertaining histories I've read in ages.

Inside North Korea

Cruising the Nile, I have been reading Barbara Demick's superb and disturbing account of life in North Korea, Nothing to Envy. Demick, an LA Times reporter who has covered Korea and China, uses the stories of six very different defectors to give an extraordinary account inside the world's most secretive country. She describes the brainwashing from birth and the absence of external information that combined to produce a zealous devotion (at least outwardly) to the Dear Leader, with people whose fortitude and reilience was extraordinary. People's lives are regulated in extraordinary detail. There are (at least in the early stages) none of the Soviet queues here as the state provides an allocation of food every fortnight and even haircuts are provided by an assembly line of hairdresssers (men one side, women the other) by the Orwellian Convenience Bureau.

Demick's witnesses move from various degrees of loyalty to varying degrees of disillusion as the Soviet Union's collapse prompts a horrendous famine that drives people to sell their meagre goods to buy from a newly emerging black market (often filled with Western aid produce) or to cook grass instead of rice. One of her witnesses, a doctor, is confronted with the disappearance of basic supplies and an expectation that she add to her 12 hour day with time picking herbs for medicine in the mountains. Electricity - the spread of which was a genuine advance in North Korea - is rationed to an hour a day. Big Brother meanwhile starts a campaign to spread a message extolling the delights of 'two meals a day' instead of three, though getting one is a challenge even for the starving children at the infant school.

All the while the propaganda is strengthened about the evils of South Korea (for whom some rumours suggest the state is stockpiling food to feed its 'starving people' after reunification) and the USA. Some brave souls manage (at huge personal risk - state police can visit at any hour) to listen to South Korean radio, adjusting blocks on their sets to do so. Mrs Song, the once loyal party apparatchik, has her faith in the Leader dimmed by a request to provoke critiques of the regime - something likely to result in years in a labour camp with 200,000 other unfortunates - from her neighbours who turn silent in her presence. Gradually, we see people escaping into China - where they can be turned back by the Chinese - in a bid either to fly to Seoul on a false passport or to go by land to Mongolia where the country is more tolerant and will deport them to South rather than North Korea. Even reaching South Korea has its own difficulties as fraudsters find ways to relieve them of their $20,000 welcome money and adjusting to such a different world is difficult. There is also the guilt of leaving family behind to their unpleasant fate as unwitting relatives of defectors. This is a story that deserves the widest possible airing. Barbara Demick's book is as important in telling the personal story of North Korea as Jung Chang's was in taking us through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is a chilling, but essential read.

A conspiracy of conspiracy theorists

I have just finished reading David Aaronovitch's brilliant demolition of conspiracy theorists, Voodoo Histories, and it is one of the most entertaining books I've read in ages. Aaronovitch shows us how the Protocols of Zion were a poor copy of a mid-19th century French novel; reminds us of western gullibility over the Stalin show trials; and moves contemporaneously to bien pensant beliefs in the 'murder' of Hilda Murrell and David Kelly (his demolition of the sanctimonious Lib Dem MP, Norman Baker is particularly powerful). Aaronovitch shows how those who think Roosevelt sat back while Pearl Harbour was bombed are as likely to think that 9/11 was a huge CIA plot. And he shows the absurdity of the beliefs in conspiracies around the deaths of JFK (I hadn't known that Oswald had tried assassination previously), Princess Di and Marilyn Monroe.

Conspiracy theorists tend to produce books full of apparently credible references, but the sources tend either to be other conspiracy theorists or chance media reports that have later been updated. Many theories are harmless and wacky; but beliefs in conspiracies can have hugely harmful effects, as with the Protocols (that fed Hitler's anti-semitism) and the acceptance of the Stalinist show trials by Western Communists or McCarthyism. As Aaronovitch says, the book is a brilliant antidote to the pub or dinner party bore who claims to have 'irrefutable proof' of a conspiracy. Thanks to his work, it is possible to retort credibly that 'stuff happens'. Do read it.

Holiday reading

Enjoying the warmth of Tenerife provided a good opportunity to catch up on my reading. I found Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope strangely uninspiring. The book is undoubtedly well-written, but its insights seemed shallow and its history rudimentary, though some of the racial insights are as refreshing as the 2004 convention speech that propelled the author into national politics. This is far more boilerplate Democratic politics than the 'new politics' it affects to represent. J.G Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life is a splendid evocation of growing up in pre-war Shanghai, of the child's sense of wonderment in two years' detention in a Japanese concentration camp (his basis for Empire of the Sun) and of the author's life in drab post-war England and as a provocateur with his enthusiasms for surrealism, science fiction and psycho-sexual exploration (notably through Crash). It is a very readable, fascinating story. I finally got around to reading Khaled Hosseini's brilliant history of modern Afghanistan through the eyes of a fictional boy, The Kite Runner, which offers as many insights into the tragic story of the nation and its people as any history book. Less satisfactory for me was Mark Slouka's The Visible World, an award-winning story of a Czech boy growing up in New York who returns to piece together his parents' past in wartime Czechoslovakia, particularly the events surrounding Heydrich's 1942 assassination by partisans. Though an intriguing story which I wanted to like, it didn't really work for me, and felt both cliched and pretentious. For light relief, I enjoyed Joshua Ferris's comic tale of Chicago office life in an ad agency as the boom years give way to layoffs, Then We Came to the End, a splendid evocation of contemporary business and office culture, and a fascinating contrast with the brilliant TV series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s Madison Avenue. I also enjoyed the latest John Grisham, The Appeal, a murky tale of political, legal and big business shenanigans over a Mississippi environmental scandal, and Alexander McCall Smith's latest tale from Botswana's finest lady detective, The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

The strange death of romantic Ireland

I have just finished reading Roy Foster's short, but magisterial review of Ireland over the last three decades. Luck & the Irish tells the story of how the Celtic Tiger was born and how peace came to Northern Ireland, but on the way takes us through the GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented) leadership of the late Charles Haughey and the attempts of his nemesis, the well-meaning Garret Fitzgerald to start what led finally to the Good Friday agreement. It is a remakable story of economic transformation - as much due to American investment as European grants - the loss of religiosity, the liberalisation of legislation and cultural renaissance which benefits from Foster's ability to marry scholarship with simple storytelling. Foster's Modern Ireland is undoubtedly the best available history of post-1600 Ireland. His new book updates the story, and reminds us just how great the changes have been.

In mixed company

Iain Dale has kindly listed me in his top 10 new blogs for his forthcoming Guide to Political Blogging (probably the only thing I have in common with John Redwood). I have also written a piece for the Guide, which is published next week.

Holiday books

Having had a head start on the MPs with my summer reading, I confess to reading neither Bower on Brown nor the latest Harry Potter. And while I have no plans to read Dawkins on God (or as God), I am reading Alastair Campbell's diaries.

However in sunny Turkey, I did enjoy uber-Democratic strategist Robert Shrum's slightly self-serving and presumably ironically titled autobiography, No Excuses, which though sadly light on his engagement in British, Irish and Israeli elections, is full of great anecdotes about his time alongside doomed campaigns from George McGovern through Ted Kennedy to Al Gore, involvement said by waspish Washington insiders to attract 'the curse of Shrum'. Yet given Bob Shrum's close relationship with Gordon Brown his book has a wider interest. And to be fair to Shrum, he masterminded numerous back-from-the-dead campaigns for senators, governors and congressmen and women. And his story is laced with delightful anecdotes, some told against himself. He fell out badly both with Jimmy Carter (whom he clearly loathes) not least as Kennedy's adviser and Bill Clinton (who still used his services to write State of the Union speeches), the latter after being overheard by a mate of Hillary's retailing gossip about the then candidate Clinton's women problems, in a DC diner. Political junkies will enjoy this book.

I caught up too with Peter Hennessy's engaging romp through the 1950s, Having it So Good, now in paperback. Hennessy takes us from the austerity of Labour's last year in government to Harold McMillan's 'never had it so good' enthusiasm for public spending. Hennessy's story is laced with engaging detail, not least on the Suez crisis, but perhaps more interestingly on the social and economic dilemmas facing the Conservative governments of the time. His fondness for cabinet papers and ministerial correspondence produces a crop of far livelier debate than might be imagined. We are reminded of how, for example, McMillan started a two month Commonwealth tour a day after his Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft and his junior ministers (including Enoch Powell) resigned in protest at a failure to implement some token spending cuts. Hennessy takes us through the 'winds of change' that led to independence for many African states, starting with Ghana fifty years ago. But intriguingly we also learn that Supermac considered joining Labour in the 1930s, but was supposedly dissuaded by Nye Bevan. Hennessy's book is a joy from start to finish: if only all history books were this good.

I also greatly enjoyed reading Andrew O'Hagan's tale of an English Catholic priest losing his way in a small Scottish parish, Be Near Me. O'Hagan writes beautifully, and has a great eye for detail. Ian McEwan's short taut tale of early 60s sexual frustration and fear, set in a Dorset coastal hotel on Edward and Florence's wedding night, On Chesil Beach, is a rewarding read. More extended short story than novel, it confirms McEwan's stature as one of our great novelists. Having found it second-hand recently, I re-entered a seedy and forbidding Dublin of drink, violence, dodgy politicians and despair over unemployment in the late eighties before the Celtic Tiger started to roar, in Dermot Bolger's gripping The Journey Home. Less impressive to my mind was the second novel by Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, whose tale of Islamicist terror and itchy IRA veterans Secret Asset ought to shout authenticity, but when the former spy chief thinks Dublin's main thoroughfare is called Connolly Street, it reads more like a particularly poor episode of Spooks. But for sheer pleasure and wonderful characters, I had to turn finally to Mma Ramotswe's Botswanese detective agency in one of her latest gentle adventures from the pen of Alexander McCall Smith. The plot of Blue Shoes and Happiness - a case of blackmail and a cook, and some mysterious happenings in the bush - is merely a sideshow in the sheer escapist ecstasy of being in the hands of a Master.