I know I am in a minority in not being bowled over by this book which comes trailing praise and prizes by the bucketload.

It is unquestionably a beautifully written work based on what seems like an awesome research effort. The conceit of the book is very clever: following the lives of the, mostly Jewish, owners of a collection of Japanese netsuke from their arrival in France in the nineteenth century through the author’s family until they end up in his possession. The form of the book is then influenced by the form of the netsuke – minature portraits of the author’s relatives in relation to each other and to some aspects of key events of the late nineteenth and twentieth century including the Dreyfuss affair, Japanese reconstruction post-Second World War, and, of course, the Holocaust.

I must say I struggled with the early parts of the book which related to the netsuke’s first owner, Charles, who the author discovers was an inspiration for Proust’s Swann. The author insists he came to like this character, but I am not sure he found him as engaging as some of his other relatives. I felt the book became considerably more alive when the scene shifted to Vienna, particularly his great grandmother Emmy, legendary in Vienna even today for her vast array of lovers, and his grandmother, the extraordinary, Elizabeth, who became the first woman to obtain a doctorate of law from Vienna university and, at some considerable risk to herself, returned to Austria after Anschluss, in an attempt to save her family from the Nazis.

The section dealing with Anschluss and its consequences is the most powerful section of the book, but the parts dealing with the author’s beloved uncle Iggy are also deeply moving.

Aside from the difficulties I had with the Paris section I think one of the frustrations I had with the book was wanting to know more. This is probably a churlish expectation given, as the author notes, he was writing about a period where the Nazis tried to erase or “overwrite” his family from European history and some of his own relatives wished their secrets to go to the grave with them, destroying correspondence to this end.

A book that leaves one hungering for more is usually the measure of a fine work. Its a deeply impressive piece of work even if it is not everyone’s dish of tea.

The Boy in the River is Richard Hoskins fine account of his involvement in the investigation of the murder of baby “Adam” – a child whose headless torso was found in the Thames, the victim of a ritual sacrifice. Hoskins knowledge of African religions provided particular insight into this case illuminating a particularly vile and little known aspect of human trafficking: that for human sacrifice.

His knowledge, honed through academic research, originated from his work as a missionary in Congo, and his memoir of this time and the tragedy he and his family suffered there is compelling. Towards the end of the book Hoskins leaves, perhaps deliberately, several loose ends in relation to this tragedy. But this is probably fair enough: the book must have been a particularly difficult one to write. As it stands it is an accessible and brave work on one of the darkest aspects of modern society.

If you do not have access to Ken Burn’s outstanding documentary on the US Civil War this is an okay introduction to the subject. It is a straightforward and relatively concise narrative of the war, started by the Southern States as a repudiation of a democratic election, the result of which offered a glimmer of a threat to their brutal slavery practices.

But there are better introductions to the subject, and there are certainly better books by John Keegan: This displays little of the novelty of Keegan’s “Six Armies in Normandy” or the insight of “Mask of Command”. Rather it seems to me to have been published to capitalise on Keegan’s reputation and little else.

It lacks editing with much repetition. Some of his judgements seem bizarre – the drawing of a lineal relationship between Sherman’s practice of total war, brutal as that was, and Hitler’s campaigns of the twentieth century is strange and certainly under-argued. But this is as nothing to his apparent endorsement (contradicting himself from a few pages earlier) of Bedford Forest’s judgement of the inferiority of black troops: citing a probable war criminal and subsequent Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan on this issue is both dubious and offensive irrespective Bedford Forest’s genius as a cavalry commander.

Towards the end of the book brief discussions of Walt Whitman and the impact of the Civil War on development of American revolutionary socialism redeem the book somewhat. It is a pity that Keegan did not explore the war from perspectives such as these rather than the more conventional approach that he adopted.

Overall a book to file under the “could do better” category for John Keegan. A reader looking for insights to the American Civil War could also certainly do better – time spent on Shelby Foote’s 3000 page magisterial work on the war, or Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s exquisite biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, would never be wasted.