Disconnect, by Devra Davis (Dutton, £18.99)
When you talk on your mobile phone, do you hold it an inch away from your ear? No, me neither. So why exactly do all phones sold today come with a tiny warning buried somewhere in the documentation not to hold them too close to the body? (I checked mine: it says at least 15mm away, which rules out carrying it in a pocket.) And why won't insurance companies insure phone makers against health lawsuits? You don't need to be wearing a tinfoil hat to find epidemiologist Davis's story very interesting. She interviews many scientists who claim their work showing harmful effects of mobile-phone radiation was suppressed, accused of fraud, or followed quickly by obscurantist industry-sponsored "research".
According to Davis's description of various studies, mobile-phone radiation kills reproductive cells in fruit-flies and breaks DNA in rats' brains. Analyses show heavy mobile-phone use in humans to be correlated with increased rates of brain and face tumours. Davis won't say "mobile phones cause cancer", but she makes a persuasive case – despite the emotive inclusion of individual case studies that, as she knows, prove nothing – for caution. Ladies and gentlemen, don your headsets.
Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran, by Annabelle Sreberny & Gholam Khiabany (IB Tauris, £14.99)
Western pontificators called it a "Twitter revolution" when disaffected young Iranians took to the net in the wake of the 2009 election results, but the authors of this excellent study are sceptical: "Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices that simply slowed the general speed of traffic [. . .] the 'real' action remained on Iranian streets and rooftops."
Sreberny and Khiabany contextualise this event with a deep cultural history of Iranian intellectual endeavour and media (electronic and otherwise) since the 1979 revolution. Despite official efforts with (US-provided) filtering software or throttling of access speeds, Iran has the most active blogging network in the Middle East, where writers campaign to free arrested colleagues or conduct intense debate over gender issues and proposed political reforms (eg the strange suggestion of "temporary marriage"). But we should be wary, as the book shows, of assuming that all online activity is dissident. The authors coin a nice phrase for writers who suck up to official ideology: "embedded intellectuals". None of those over here, of course.
Enter Night: Metallica, the Biography, by Mick Wall (Orion, £20)
This flaming juggernaut of a heavy-metal biog opens with a chillingly dramatic reconstruction of the bus crash in Sweden that killed Metallica's first bass-player in 1986. From there we rewind to geeky tape-copying childhoods and the making of friendships, and pretty soon it's all chugging riffs, stadium triumphs, groupies and gack, and the persistent spectre of musical differences. The author boasts years of interviews with the band (and rivals) to draw on, and writes a deceptively casual-looking, sincere but half-amused prose, spiced with the occasional rock-appropriate "hellacious" or "fucking". Aficionados of the Metallica documentary movie, Some Kind of Monster, might disagree that there are "few laughs" in it; but Wall is no uncritical fan, giving savage thumbnail reviews of below-par work (Death Magnetic is "tokenistic [. . .] thrash-made-easy"), as well as making the horns for the classics ("'One' was both nightmare writ large and musically transcendent journey"). Naturally, the pages are stuffed with hedonistic rock anecdotes, including James Hetfield "slamming away" with a female admirer while bellowing "That'll be fine!"
