This month’s best paperbacks: Emmanuel Carrère, Mary Trump and more

If you were under the impression that the opposite of a cynic is an easily hoodwinked person of low mental horsepower, then Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology and director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, has news for you. The idea that cynics are somehow more astute is the first of many notions demolished in this succinct, uplifting book.

Cynics perform less well in cognitive tests and “have a harder time spotting liars than non-cynics”. They are wrong more often than optimists, and the damage to their wellbeing, and to society, is higher than that incurred by their hopeful counterparts. Like an autoimmune disease, what starts out as a misguided defensive reaction ends up causing self-harm. (Zaki is careful early on to distinguish between “big-c” Cynics of the ancient philosophical tradition, and the cynicism “most of us know today” – which can be summarised as a lack of faith in our fellow humans.)

Cynicism is bad for us on several levels. Cynics are sicker, more depressed, drink more and die younger than their less cynical counterparts. On a societal level, “study after study finds that cynical beliefs eat away at relationships, communities, economies, and society itself”. Conversely, people who live in high-trust communities are longer-lived, healthier and happier – benefits Zaki translates into the equivalent of a 40% pay rise. And yet, over a 50-year period, cynicism has risen dramatically. The proportion of Americans agreeing that “most people can be trusted” fell by 20% between 1972 and 2018. Zaki’s data focuses on the US, but his findings can certainly be applied more widely.

In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State terrorists who, the following night, rampaged through the French capital. Three attacked the Stade de France, where a football friendly between France and Germany was being played. Arriving late, they were denied entry to the stadium and blew themselves up outside.

At the same time, another group opened fire on cafes and bars in the city centre. Two members fled, while another walked into a restaurant and detonated his suicide vest. Meanwhile, the remaining trio entered the Bataclan theatre, where a crowd of 1,500 were attending a gig by the US rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The attack and subsequent siege lasted two and a half hours and ended with all three terrorists dead. Across the city, 130 people had been murdered and hundreds more injured.

Five years later, in the autumn of 2020, on the eve of publishing his new book, Yoga, and reeling from a difficult few years – mental illness, divorce, legal battles – Emmanuel Carrère was hunting for a subject. The author, who wrote fiction before branching into true crime, unconventional biographies and a string of extraordinary, deeply exposing memoirs, making him one of France’s most highly regarded writers, contacted an editor at the news magazine Le Nouvel Obs putting himself forward for work – “You know the kind of stuff I’m comfortable with: less opinion pieces than fieldwork, maybe a criminal case.”

What the editors of Le Nouvel Obs eventually decided on wasn’t just any criminal case, but the largest in French history: the trial of those accused of involvement in the Paris terror attacks of 13 November 2015 (Friday, or vendredi, 13: V13). Carrère’s task was to show up, observe and file a weekly piece, and this book (translated from French by John Lambert) is the result. The challenge posed by a trial as inherently dramatic as V13 isn’t how to render it interesting, but how to traverse its morass of detail and sometimes contradictory defence testimony. The skill with which he does so is extraordinary.

To write a biography of a figure as well known as Marie Curie and still offer something fresh or surprising is no easy undertaking. The double Nobel prizewinner is, as author Dava Sobel acknowledges, the only female scientist most people can name.

To help shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a bestselling writer of science histories, has interwoven her account of Curie’s life and scientific discoveries with those of dozens of female scientists who passed through her lab in Paris.

Alongside all the firsts – Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and remains the only person to win Nobel prizes in two different scientific fields – she was also a devoted mother and carer for ageing relatives. She experienced the grief of miscarriage, and then in 1906 the earth-shattering loss of her beloved husband, Pierre, in a carriage accident. A few years later, she had an affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin that became a public scandal and virtually forced her into hiding. She lived through the first world war, when she led efforts to bring X-ray units closer to the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers, and drove one such voiture radiologique herself. She lectured far and wide and befriended many great scientists of her time, including Albert Einstein. There is, in other words, much to cover before you even consider the women whose paths briefly crossed with Curie’s until their work or life took them in other directions.

Sobel does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand the historical importance and context of Curie’s work, but her interior life remains largely mysterious. I found myself itching to consult other sources – her collected letters to her daughters, her mourning journal, the biography written by one of her daughters, Ève – in order to fill in the gaps.

In 2023, Blur played the biggest shows in their history over two weekend nights at Wembley Stadium. For Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree, it was a signal moment in an objectively great band’s history.

Over the Rainbow is less the story of a rock band reconvening for one final(ish) weekend of triumph than a 180-page insight into the joyfully chaotic life of Blur’s food-obsessed bassist. James has written two other memoirs: the first, Bit of a Blur, told the raucous story of 90s excess, the second, All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry, the less-raucous tale of swapping life in London for a rambling farm in the Cotswolds. Over the Rainbow is a mixture of these two strands: the story of trying to balance the demands of running a farm, and the festival that takes place there, with a return to stadium rock’s frontline.

He is an underrated musician, but don’t expect tracts on the merits of the Fender Precision bass: his passions are of the edible sort. There’s probably more in Over the Rainbow on the merits of broth, crisps, cheese on toast and cider. And there’s less than you might expect on the relationships between the members of the band.

That’s a shame because, as interesting as the story of the English sparkling wine James has sourced for his festival is, it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit more on the mechanics of the reunion. There are some touching moments in To the End, when relations between James and Albarn tentatively thaw over a pint near Albarn’s home studio in south Devon. Here, the only hint at complex dynamics comes at a show in Mexico City, during which Albarn won’t even make eye contact with his bass player. James is crestfallen until he discovers that the singer is actually just trying hard to fend off a bout of food poisoning.

James is an entertaining narrator. You might not learn much about rock’n’roll while reading Over the Rainbow, but you’ll probably have a fine old time while doing so.

Once again, Mary Trump strafes her family, with her third book in four years. Who Could Ever Love You presents the Trump name as both cocoon and nightmare. Dysfunction reigns. Think of it as a burn book. All get singed.

At times, Trump wishes Trump was not her surname. But she won’t abandon the legacy. She has delivered two bestsellers – Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man and The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal. Her third book also follows All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, a memoir by Fred C Trump III, Mary’s older brother, now estranged.

Their home life sounds brutal – Linda Clapp, their mother, straight out of Mommy Dearest. Mary portrays her as cruelly oblivious. She repeatedly refused to bring young Mary to the hospital during late-night asthma attacks. Instead, she plunked Mary into her own bed.

Mary’s father, Fred Trump Jr, neglected his kids. When he was around, he wasn’t present. He hit the bottle, divorced Clapp and died young. Mary loved him anyway. But his own father, Fred Trump Sr, repeatedly trampled his son, despising him for who he was and what he wasn’t. The elder Trump came to disinherit Fred Jr and his “issue”, at the urging of his surviving children, the next oldest boy, Donald Trump, among them. Think The Apprentice or Family Feud, crossed with Lord of the Flies.

Predictably, Mary dishes on Uncle Donald. Her animus runs long and deep, back to grade school days. He bullied her, equating cruelty with attention. Little has changed.

Mary writes: “It didn’t take me long to realize that Donald couldn’t do much more than throw a baseball, which he did, as hard as he could at his nieces and nephews, who were all under ten.”

Trump pitched hard and wild, she writes, rarely meeting the strike zone. On the rare occasions when he connected with her mitt, her eight-year-old hand shuddered.

The epilogue is more upbeat. Mary describes a winter evening in New York. “The lights of the city – my city – shone behind me. There is no way to know if a chance for redemption or even forgiveness exists anymore, but in that moment, I felt the world opening up again.”

Joan Smith is braver than I am. A classicist, as well as a feminist campaigner, she describes pulling up a male guide in Rome’s Palazzo Massimo on his description of one of the women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. “It’s in the sources,” he protested, to which Smith replied, possibly with an eye-roll, that she was familiar with them. His belittling phrase provides the title for her book.

There was a chapter on ancient Rome in her 1989 classic, Misogynies, but the impetus for a full-blown study came from the British Museum’s Nero exhibition in 2021, which aimed “to question the traditional narrative of the ruthless tyrant, revealing a different Nero, a popular leader”. This revisionism, Smith proposes, is rarely if ever extended to the wives, sisters, daughters and mothers of the emperors, perennially depicted as shrews, scheming bitches or lust-crazed she-wolves. Accordingly, she sets out to tell alternative stories of 23 Roman noblewomen.

Smith takes aim at modern historians (not all of them male) who unthinkingly repeat ancient slanders, and rereads the sources with an eye to misogynist tropes. Her most stirring and contentious strategy is to relate the misdeeds of the Roman emperors to contemporary crimes, to indicate just how little has changed. Thus the fate of Claudius’s much younger wife Messalina, her name for centuries a byword for lust, is linked to the scandal of grooming gangs. Nero’s alleged sexual interest in his mother, Agrippina, leads Smith to observe that “mother-son incest” is a common internet search, and his matricide brings to mind the Sandy Hook killer’s first victim. Nero’s habit of throttling his wife, Octavia, meanwhile, is a sinister echo of the “rough sex” murder defence. “You don’t have to be a Roman emperor to get away with terrifying women,” Smith drily observes.

Daisy Dunn’s recent The Missing Thread, which aimed to restore women’s place in a traditionally male-centred account of the ancient world, is considerably more measured in its pages on imperial Rome. Where Smith’s Claudius is indifferent to his wife Messalina’s murder, to Dunn he’s “in denial”. Dunn has Julia the Elder dying “probably of starvation”; Smith makes no such caveat. Sources can be read in vastly different ways. Still, on this impassioned reading, the “nymphomaniac” slur can confidently be put to bed.

“Gerald Durrell was magic” chirrups David Attenborough across the cover of this collection by the beloved naturalist and author who died in 1995. Chosen by Durrell’s widow to mark his centenary, it includes magazine pieces, radio talks, letters, introductions to other people’s books and a selection from the vast archive of his unpublished writing. What binds the pieces is the signature magic of which Attenborough, whose own career parallels and counterpoints Durrell’s, speaks. It might best be described as the gift of finding wonder everywhere.

Durrell’s most famous book remains My Family and Other Animals (1956) and for those who can’t get enough of it, there’s a chance here to revisit the strawberry-pink villa, with its garden of sun-drunk wildlife and the ebullient Spiro, taxi-driver turned major-domo who watches over the Durrells fondly, “as though we were slightly weak-minded children”. Theo is here too, the polymathic scientist who presents Gerry with his first pocket microscope so that the boy-naturalist may peer with even more concentrated wonder into the exquisite silk-lined burrows of the trapdoor spiders that are dotted all over his new island home.

In his conservation and writing work, Durrell made a point of concentrating on “the little brown jobs”, those unglamorous species whom no one would miss until it was far too late. Creatures like the cleaner fish of the Great Barrier Reef, which scurries around hoovering parasites from larger fish before “standing back to admire their handiwork rather like hairdressers admiring the creation of a new hairstyle”. Or what about the big Madagascar hissing cockroach, “a beast the size of a small tangerine, with a formidable array of spikes and spines on his chocolate brown body and legs”, which, when captured, purrs loudly. The list of these underrated creatures unspools delightfully. There is the hairy frog, the booming squirrel, the umbrellabird, the paradoxical frog and the (frankly irresistible) fairy penguin, which brays like a donkey. Truly, there is magic here.