Short takes: Non fiction

DEFYING HITLER by Sebastian Haffner (Phoenix, $27.95)

This wonderful memoir of growing up in Germany during Hitler's rise to power attempts to answer those questions so often asked of that generation: how was Nazism possible; and why weren't the fascists stopped? Haffner wrote this memoir in 1939 shortly after he escaped to England, but it wasn't published until after he died in 1999. Those who have read the earlier, hardcover version will be interested to know that last year a German historian discovered six additional chapters. These comprise a chilling and uncomfortable account of the author's time in a Nazi training camp which he had to attend in order to take his examinations to become a judge, and where he discovers that "each one of us is the Gestapo of the others". This is indeed "history in person", sharp, insightful, humane, brilliant.

THE WRITING LIFE: Writers on how they think and work, edited by Marie Arana (Public Affair, $39.95)

This fascinating collection of essays (and short biographical sketches) by more than 50 important contemporary writers is culled from 10 years of columns in the Washington Post. It's a marvellous view "from the inside", and goes some way towards answering the questions that most writers are asked time and again: "How/what/when/where/why do you write?" There's no formulaic answer, of course, and this collection isn't a write-by-numbers. But it is an insight into the way writers' minds can work and, if anything, it simply underscores one of the most mysterious aspects of "creative" writing - that "surrendering to the power of the unconscious mind", as Joanna Trollope puts it. Nadine Gordimer touches on another brutal truth about the process: "You're on your own," she writes.

DEVIANT SCEPTICS: Conversations on faith and doubt, edited by Bel Mooney (Hodder & Stoughton, $39.99)

Devout Sceptics is the name of a popular BBC Radio 4 series whose large audiences give the lie to the conclusions we might make about our silly era if we were to judge it by, say, our own Channel 2. Hosted by Bel Mooney, and with a different distinguished guest each week, its goal was to address the question: "Is there a god?" or, to put it another way, to address the relationship between struggling humankind and its highest aspiration. Out of that long-running programme has grown this anthology: 20 selected transcripts, including interviews with people as diverse as Isabel Allende, Simon Russell Beale, James Lovelock, Philip Pullman and so on - writers, scientists, philosophers, actors. Reading this book is like being part of a wonderfully stimulating conversation.

AN ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS ADVENTURE by John Bougen & Jill Malcolm (Penguin, $27.95)

The things people will do to get into the Guinness Book of Records ... Auckland businessman John Bougen and his cousin James Irving have broken the record for "the most countries visited in six months" - 191 countries in 150 days, clocking up a lot of other numbers in the process: 241,800km, 104 airlines, an excruciating 576 hours in waiting rooms. Of course, they had many colourful, albeit quick, adventures along the way, and they are reproduced here in crisp and lively style. This is armchair travel at its most shameful: someone else's dream, someone else's trip. But so much more comfortable than being there.

OUTPOSTS: Journeys to the surviving relics of the British Empire, Simon Winchester (Penguin, $27.95)

In 1985 Winchester travelled around the outposts of Britain's empire to see what was left. The result was characteristically entertaining, genial and insightful. Now, he's updated the book, mainly through the inclusion of a new foreword, in which he notes the great growth of post-colonial literature and the further retraction of the British Empire (he was there, for example, at the handing back to China of Hong Kong). He draws attention to the latest and possibly most creepy empire to come sneaking up on us, the "informal empire" of globalisation and then, rather bravely, I thought, questions the amount of harm done by those earlier empires. Winchester certainly broadens our horizons, and has a homing instinct for a good story.