Non-Fiction

Sex and the Psyche
By Brett Kahr

What, one might well ask, tempted 19,000 adult Britons to reveal their most private sexual fantasies to the psychotherapist Brett Kahr for this, the biggest survey ever of its kind? For the exhibitionists out there - and they are surprisingly numerous - the answer is obvious; for the more fastidious, less so. Kahr doesn't really answer the questions he asks: why do we have sexual fantasies? Why do they differ? What do they mean? There are other answers, though: Kylie Minogue and Elizabeth Hurley feature with monotonous predictability for men; for the ladies, bemusingly, Cliff Richard easily beats George Clooney. Even more imaginative are those who fancy sex with aliens or Saddam Hussein - or, in the case of one respondent, who goes under the alias 'Laird', a good time means 'dirty sex with soot' and Kathy Burke. We are all filthy, it appears, it's just that some of us are filthier than others.

Allen Lane, £25

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Notebooks
By Tennessee Williams

If you had to guess the nature of Tennessee Williams's personality from these notebooks, the fact that he was a playwright would not get a look in. For the impression they give is of a man too broken to write - a deeply unhappy soul seeking solace from life's many disappointments in drink, drugs and casual sex. Of his life as a feted author he has little to say. What made his moods darker was that he could see what he was doing. His jottings are full of exhortations to stop "whining", and he was unsparing of himself: "I am egocentric, introspective, morbid, sensual, irreligious, lazy, timid, cowardly" - a charge-sheet that on the evidence here is harsh but true. The fact that Williams used these notebooks "mostly for distress signals" means that they can lack light and shade, but the light they shine on the dark parts of his character is both bright and unwavering.

Yale, £27.50

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When a Crocodile
Eats the Sun
By Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin's Mukiwa recounted the story of his boyhood in Rhodesia in the 1960s when the country took its first steps towards the abyss down which it is now plunging. This new volume takes the story, through the lives of his parents who stayed on in the country after Independence, deep into Mugabe's suicidal rule. At the time of Independence life expectancy in Zimbabwe was 60 years, now it is 33, and this grim shrinkage of expectations is everywhere to be seen when Godwin visits from his new home in New York. His parents hardly dare go out for fear of rape, robbery and violence; inflation means that at one point they can't pay the 12,000 dollars necessary for some bread and croissants. Being English, they don't complain. Except it transpires that Godwin senior is really a Polish Jew, Kazimirez Goldfarb - another shock for the son. This is a powerful account of how paradise - personal and national - was lost.

Picador, £16.99

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Letter to a Christian Nation
By Sam Harris

The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris does not take kindly to religion. He is a self-proclaimed prophet of atheism and his aim in this short book is "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity" - though it might take a rather longer volume to do that. Of course much of his task is simply shooting fish in a barrel: the Bible is indeed inconsistent and demonstrably not the work of a Supreme Being, and religion and war are traditional bedfellows. These, however, are the hoariest of arguments and ones that theologians of all the great faiths have been knocking back for centuries. But pointing out the lack of objectivity in religion does nothing to explain why it still has such appeal. What Harris does not tackle is faith itself, and without doing that his attack on irrationalism - as he dubs it - is itself nothing less than irrational.

Bantam Press, £10

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