Non-Fiction

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire By John Darwin

Empires, for all their strengths - their military, industrial and demographic resources - are fragile things. It may take centuries before empires develop fatal fault lines, but disintegrate they always do. John Darwin's magisterial study examines the world's empires after the death of Tamerlane in 1405 when the balance of power poised uncertainly between Europe, Central Asia and China. That Europe, and its offshoot America, won out was, he points out, almost accidental. For almost two centuries the West and the Ottoman East were engaged in a wrestling match and only when it was over did expansion - mainly British - begin: India, East Africa, Australia. With territorial growth came economic growth and thus the largest of all empires was born. While there is nothing particularly new about Darwin's thesis, he is a subtle analyser of the strengths and weaknesses of his great powers - and very shrewd as to why the latest arrival, America, has every reason to be looking over its shoulder.

Allen Lane, £25

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A Long Way Gone
By Ishmael Beah

The theme of boy soldiers in Africa has been used by novelists and by writers of non-fiction to chronicle the moral degradation parts of Africa has slipped into. A Long Way Gone, though, is the first memoir by one of the child combatants themselves and it is a chilling book. Ishmael Beah was 12 when he was forced by government troops to fight in Sierra Leone's civil war. For several yeas in the mid 1990s he was fed drugs, given an AK-47 and urged to kill. He did not know who he was killing or who he was killing for. His account of his post-conflict rehabilitation is just as terrifying - UN staff and teachers assaulted, schoolmates killed. Recovery was a slow process. Beah finally made it out of Africa to America where this powerful book has made him a celebrity. The feeling remains, however, that he witnessed far more and far worse than he tells here.

Fourth Estate, £14.99

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Anacaona
By Alicia Castro with Ingrid Kummels

Here, as the subtitle puts it, are 'the amazing adventures of Cuba's first all-girl dance band'. The band, Anacaona, a Buena Vista Social Club for women, was formed in 1932 by the 11 daughters of the impoverished Castro family and became a huge success both in Cuba and pre-war America. The author, Alicia Castro, is now 87 but was 12 when she first took to the stage; she soon found herself performing with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. The sisters' triumphs were all the more remarkable both for breaking through in a male-dominated world and for the way they took every aspect of the band - from contracts to repertoire - under their own control. This memoir, helped by a rich array of photographs, conjures up evocatively the heady rumba, mambo, cha-cha-cha atmosphere of pre-Fidel (no relation) Cuba.

Atlantic, £19.99

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Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea
By Christine Garwood

We have known that the Earth was round since Pythagoras and the Greeks, yet there have always been hardy souls willing to argue, vociferously, that it is flat (a recent survey showed that 95 per cent of eight-year-olds still think it is). Christine Garwood's entertaining book is a study of the persistence of the idea. Her main focus is on the dotty Victorians - 'Parallax', for example, who claimed the Earth was a disc only 400 miles from the Sun, and John Hampden who dismissed Newton magnificently as either "in liquor or insane" and called astronomers "demented star-gazers". The idea survived into recent times nonetheless, an English adherent being faced with explaining away the evidence of the Apollo Moon missions in the 1960s. Garwood shows that it has usually been religion rather than science that lay behind these misguided folk. But however risible the flat Earth folks' ideas seem to us, creationists are actively preaching an equally barking creed now.

Macmillan, £20

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