Monday Book: Great minds made simpler

THERE IS a long tradition in British publishing of self-education books, dating back to the Teach Yourself series of the 1940s, designed for the autodidact or that elusive "intelligent general reader". This re-issued and enlarged series in comic-strip form aims to continue that tradition, although some have queried whether, in an age of proliferating universities, there is still anyone left who has fallen through the educational net.

The obvious danger for any such series is of falling between two stools. If the level is made too simple, it will not satisfy readers who already have a nodding acquaintance with the subject; if more advanced, there is the danger of losing readers and failing to qualify as an introduction. Such a series must achieve four objectives: it must hit the optimum point between ease and difficulty; it must provide a lucid account, avoiding all jargon; it must avoid all parti pris or hidden agendas; and it should stimulate the reader to tackle further books.

How do the first titles in Icon's redesigned series stack up against those criteria? In a very mixed bunch, one can identify four categories: those that are almost completely successful; those that are partly so; those that fail through having "lost the plot"; and dire, politically- correct products tricked out with rebarbative jargon.

In the first category, one would have to award pride of place to the pioneering comic-strip introduction to Marx, written by the Mexican cartoonist Rius and first published in 1976. But certain volumes do not fall far short of his standard. In this category one would place Psychology by Nigel C Benson and Freud by Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate. They give the required thumbnail sketch and, in intellectual terms, satisfy Noel Coward's prescription for the actor: they come on, say their lines, do not bump into the furniture, and get off.

Only slightly less successful is Mathematics, a tripartite effort by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz and Boris Van Loon. One's only, tiny reservation is that the authors slightly forget their readership in the middle and wander into some quite difficult formulae. One could, however, defend this slight deviation from lucidity on the grounds of giving the reader a flavour of real mathematics.

All these books deal with clear-cut material but with Feminism, by Susan Alice Watkins, Marisa Rueda and Marta Rodriguez, we encounter the first real difficulty, in an otherwise useful and interesting guide. This is that the concept is an umbrella word covering very disparate subject matter. This problem becomes acute in Postmodernism by Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt - the portmanteau concept par excellence. The author struggles to make sense of a notion so broad, it can cover anything from male stripping to the Millennium bug. Even so, this is a valiant attempt to be even-handed.

The problem of bias makes its appearance in Jung by Maggie Hyde and Michael McGuinness. The writer, Maggie Hyde, is an astrologer and committed Jungian, and she makes what is marginal to Jung's theory the centrepiece of her exposition. Jung was interested in the paranormal and made a number of tentative suggestions on such matters as ghosts, astrology and even UFOs. Maggie Hyde elevates this aspect, which even many of Jung's admirers are dubious about, to a position of centrality. This gives a very distorted view of the Swiss psychologist. The flaws merely underline the general truth that the author of an introductory guide should be a detached observer and not a player in the drama. We do not expect an objective view of Saving Private Ryan if we ask Tom Hanks for a critique.

Einstein, by Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness, is a good example of the partially successful introduction. Schwartz wastes too much time in unnecessary scene-setting, giving us a potted history of the German electrochemical industry. One wishes he would cut to the chase and when he does, his exposition of the 1905 Special Theory of Relativity is very good. But, displaying a woeful sense of proportion, he does not deal at all with the 1915 General Theory. Those who want a proper introduction to that are advised to turn to Bertrand Russell's The ABC of Relativity and The Analysis of Matter, where Russell manages to convey a lucid understanding of the world of gravitation-tensors, differential equations and all.

Finally, disaster. Postfeminism by Sophia Phoca and Rebecca Wright is what they call in Ireland a "thundering disgrace", written by a gender warrior in a dreadful esoteric jargon, without regard to grammar, syntax or the most elementary requirements of style. The final verdict on this series must be that the editors need to establish more quality control, to jettison the feebler among their contributors and, above all, to find people who can write plain English.

Frank McLynn

The reviewer's latest book is `1066: the year of the three battles' (Cape)