Pass it On

When you spend your weeks reading new novels it gets hard to even look at books that are dog-eared or even thumbed once. Book Notes made an exception this week as news of Avian Flu in Nigeria and dying swans in Europe made the world feel a little bit smaller and deadly disease just a little closer.

Now, we're no experts but we believe Laurie Garret's The Coming Plague to be the work of record on all things bio-unfriendly. Published in 1994 it has been there for us through Ebola, Malaria, Legionnaires Disease and SARS, authoritatively assuring us that our fears are unfounded because something far more deadly lies just around the corner. Eschewing the dry lifeless nature of the usual scholarly textbook it is a gripping ominous trip from river to forest, city to zoo. It traces the virulent path of impending doom across the globe, landing us in our modern, threatening times. If your every headache is a tumour, every stray animal your harbinger of doom, you'll never leave the house again. But you'll be an enviable authority in the process.

Monkeys and Sharks and Writers Oh My

In an odd week we saw a brutal death befall a children's author while a more prosaic end occurred for the man who really did bring holidaymakers back to the beaches in the 70s. Only to the shore mind you – a tag line of 'You'll Never Go Back in The Water' and a huge Spielberg movie adaptation was enough to make Jaws the bestseller of 1974 and 1975, doing for the airport thriller what the movie did for the blockbuster. While he achieved success with subsequent novels like The Deep and Shark Trouble, the power and visceral energy of Jaws ensured Peter Benchley was never able to escape the grip of his debut novel and the creatures which turned out to be his life's work. It shoved him into the major league of Hailey and Puzo, making the man eating sharks the equivalent to The Da Vinci Code. Benchley died of a pulmonary embolism at 65 after devoting his later years to shark related environmental issues. A less publicised end came last week for Alan Shalleck, co-creator and writer of the Curious George children's series, who was murdered on the eve of his greatest success. Shalleck was found stabbed to death after being robbed by two assailants in his hometown in Florida last week. Curious George, a particularly irritating children's book and toy was made into an 80s cartoon series to frustrate Irish viewers of Anything Goes eagerly awaiting the arrival of Mary Fitzgerald. This month saw the arrival of his most famous character as an animated full length movie. Shallack was responsible for 28 books featuring Curious George, the curious little monkey.

Spanning the Dull Decades

Each year brings a steady flurry of stories about mute Pakistani paperboys or illiterate Danish weathermen who have broken publishing history by securing unforeseen riches for the rights to publish their life stories. Just as predictably, these are rarely seen or heard of again while the shelves groan under the purely literal weight of Jordan or Sharon Osbourne's latest revelations. As combined these are selling more than 70,000 copies a week in the UK this month, one has to ask – what more could you possibly want to know? Obviously, worldwide thirst for celebrity biography knows no bounds. From the home of Bill Clinton's My Life and Hilary Rodham Clinton's upcoming manifesto will come the life and presumably exceedingly dull times of Alan Greenspan. How much do you imagine the auction for the rights to his risk-averse tales has reached? Over $5m has been offered for the inside track on the minute adjustments he made to interest rates during his 18 year reign as Charman of the Fed. Book Notes concedes that the implications of his work are history worth telling – but surely someone else's history. One would have to hope he saw some really interesting sights in the ante room of the Oval Office to justify this type of inflated bidding. Now to be found offering himself as an advisor to Gordon Brown, Mr Greenspan might be able to provide some advice on positive spin to the British Chancellor.

Back to The Hill Road

Village reviewed Patrick O'Keefe's The Hill Road last July, describing it as a "beautifully written collection of four novellas" with an "unerring ring of nostalgic truth". Set in rural Limerick in the '50s it made an interesting counterpoint to the dreary urban life of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Our only complaint at the time was how hard it was to discover anything about the book or its author, excepting the standard press release. O'Keefe is an emigrant from Limerick, currently domiciled at the University of Michigan where he lectures in English. Hopefully he will prove easier to track down with an anticipated paperback publication of the collection and his deserved victory in the Story Prize for Short Fiction, an American competition which carries a $20,000 award for the year's best short story. The prize is the richest on offer in the States and will be some consolation for the book's somewhat muted reception here last year.