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Paperbacks Tom Widger

The Yin Yang Complex

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz As a Young Boy

Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation 1940-44

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The Yin Yang Complex By Brendan Foley, Mercier Press €15 250pps

ON THE night of Brendan Foley's birth, the midwife took one look at him and announced that he had "no innocence in his eyes, like he has seen it all before". Well, golleee. Are we in Oprah country here? Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, because Foley has some solid advice and information to impart. He provides the reader with wonderful breathing exercises, along with insights on why history keeps repeating itself and the homogenising of modern relationships with men becoming more female than their women. That said, there's no excuse for some of the kookier claims. There is the so-called power of positive thinking, increasingly doled out by life coaches and motivational speakers. Foley quotes women who cured themselves of cancer by using "positive affirmations". Nothing wrong with being positive, but it won't extend your life. Your mind is saying one thing, but your body is saying otherwise. Another claim? Illnesses are cured "because the people suffering... took responsibility for the illness." What about environmental causes? What about congenital disease? Where does that leave the unborn baby damaged by pharmaceutical drugs? Nine years ago, lab studies revealed that HRT increased the risk of breast cancer and sales of the drug dropped off immediately. It's good to be positive, but not to the point of delusion.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz As a Young Boy By Thomas Buergenthal, Profile £9 230pps

HERE IS ample material for the mother and father of all misery memoirs, yet Buergenthal writes with great understatement and a wonderful understanding of humanity. This may be because the memoir was written 60 years after the events described. So it is reflective, yes, but nonetheless not lacking in pace and immediacy. The horror, the horror. He recalls the years in the ghetto and one incident where a policeman or gestapo officer strolls about casually shooting people in the back of the neck. "After that I was afraid." Understatement? In the camp, he comes across Dr Mengele and, I would guess, thanks God he hadn't a twin. Mengele had a thing about twins. Buergenthal is unique in that his past has given him an understanding of the war crimes he now adjudicates on as a member of the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation 1940-44 By Charles Glass, Harper £10 520pps

SEE Hemingway, "grimy and bloody", liberating Paris. The only thing Hemingway liberated was the cellar of the Ritz bar, swigging back the bottles that would one day bring about his early death. This is not exactly an untold account – how life in Paris went on normally under Nazi rule – but that said, Glass's account has a mass of new detail, some absorbing portraits, and myths. Hemingway grimy and bloody? Must have fallen down drunk on a broken bottle. Among other leading characters are Charles Bedaux, an unbridled capitalist who did business with the Nazis and committed suicide to avoid trial in 1944, as well as Sylvia Beach, Petain, de Gaulle and Sumner Jackson, the self-effacing hero of the American Hospital in Neuilly who was killed by British "friendly fire". Absorbingly detailed with end notes and superbly indexed: the notes, bibliography and acknowledgements come in at 105 pages.