Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

One River by Wade Davis (Vintage, £10.99)

I decided to read this book because Davis’s last one, Into the Silence, a stunning account of early attempts to climb Everest, was so good. Davis is a scientist and explorer. Here he tells us about his own exploration of the Amazon — and it’s superb in every way. As a scientific and historical account it couldn’t be clearer or better written. He tells us about the Conquistadors and also about the relationship between human beings and the coca plant. He takes you into remote worlds and shows you how they work; he’s also excellent on the explorers themselves. Perhaps even better than the Everest book.

Money: the unauthorised biography by Felix Martin (Vintage, £9.99)

What is money? It’s not quite true to say that it’s coins and banknotes — tokens and bits of paper. It’s also something else, something that underlies the tokens and paper. Felix Martin tells us about a tribe on a Pacific island for whom money was big doughnut-shaped rocks. In other words, tokens. The islanders paid each other using them. But the rocks never changed hands. They stayed in the same place. People just remembered who the new owner was. And this collective memory, this language of trust — that’s the essence of money. A terrific analysis of what’s so good about this, and how it can go so wrong.

I Laughed, I Cried by Viv Groskop (Orion, £8.99)

“I had always dreamed of being a stand-up comic but only in the way that you might dream of walking on the moon,” writes Viv Groskop. How do you become a stand-up? Groskop decides to perform 100 gigs in 100 days, and this book is a lovely, captivating account of what it’s like to do so. Scary, brilliant, mortifying, triumphal — for the performer, comedy gigs are an intense experience. As Stewart Lee has shown, and Groskop shows here, they are themselves great material. And this isn’t just a good book about how to become a comic; on another level, it’s a good book about tackling any big life challenge.