IF EVER a book needed a sub-title, this one does. Heroes and Villains? After the initial shock . . . eight Manchester United footballers were killed as their plane crashed on take off . . . came the sobering aftermath. Forty-nine years after the tragedy, the survivors and their dependants are still being treated like "vermin" and "rubbish" by one of the richest clubs in the world. Hero No 1, goalkeeper Harry Gregg returned again and again to the burning plane hauling out survivors. Villain No 1, United chief executive Martin Edwards, was approached by former Busby Babe John Doherty in 1998 who sought his help in organising a benefit match for the survivors. "But why now, John, after 40 years?" "Because they are f***ing skint!" came the stinging reply. When the match did go ahead, the supremely egotistical Eric Cantona exploited the situation by insisting that he play.

Hidden Streams -- New History of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown
By Brian MacAongusa
Currach Books
191pp

IT IS generally a good idea to at least listen to experts. South County Dublin has about 30 underground rivers and streams between the Dodder to the north and the Dargle to the South. Building developments have driven them underground out of sight and out of memory. That is, until record levels of rainfall spring them to the surface, which is what happened last June in Rathfarnham and again in Blackrock in July. A further stream of disasters will follow if the authorities don't act. In this scholarly account, we are provided with anecdote and social history: the threshing mills built by the La Touche family on the banks of the Little Dargle. Read, with growing amusement, the Great Pig Hunt exacted on the Chief Justice by a journalist. Of course.

Mayflower, A Voyage to War
Nathaniel Philbrick
Harper
�10 460pp
THE ship transporting the nonconformists from the religious intolerance of Charles the First's England to the New World was fortuitously named. This was indeed anticipated as a new flowering. Co-operation, peace, even cordiality with the native "Indians". Which they initially enjoyed. Gradually, though, Philbrick tells how the friendship between settler and native disintegrated. The natives were attracted to what the settlers brought with them; guns, alcohol, farming tools and when what they first traded for these articles (fur-bearing animals) were hunted to near extinction, the natives traded a lot of their land. Land grabs increased, natives eased out, fighting began. A new twist, at least new to this reader, is how a boatload of troublesome Indians were shipped to Africa and dumped there.

So He Takes the Dog
Jonathan Buckley
Harper
�8 326pp
THIS has been done before. On the shores of a rundown coastal village, the body of a man . . . who turns out to be a homeless local . . . is discovered by one of the villagers who has been nagged by his wife to take the dog for a walk. One by one we are introduced to the villagers; the would-be bohemian artist, the narrator policeman and his wife . . . let's just say that passion has taken flight from their liaison . . . a young man who used to spy on the homeless man for whatever reason, and as the story unfolds we learn that the homeless man meant different things to different people, and as it reaches a climax there is a twist that you won't see coming.

Clever Girl: Growing Up In the 1950s
Brian Thompson
Atlantic Books
�8 247pp
IF YOU want, once again, to read about someone else's misery, Thompson's memoir is your book. Thompson seemed to have wanted for nothing, except the attentive care of his parents. His mother was manic depressive. She hated her husband. He couldn't stand the sight of her. They both seemed to loathe their son. Thompson was beaten savagely by his father and emotionally battered by his mother. In time he will escape both, but, in a Larkinesque sense, will he ever escape either parent? Really, the sensible reader will finish up not caring.