Funeral fights, dogs and whip of therapy

What can happen in around 100 pages? Quite a lot, judging by these three bitesized pieces of reportage. Funeral Wars is by the guy who wrote the screenplay for the legal thriller, A Civil Action. The story it tells about a Mississippi lawsuit in 1995 reads like real-life John Grisham, with a central character to match. When the patriarch of a local chain of funeral parlours decided to sue an empire-building Canadian funeral tycoon for breach of contract, the lawyer he hired was so shamelessly over the top that a novelist might in fact have hesitated to invent him. Willie Gary, the king of the personal injury suit in the Deep South, is the son of black migrant labourers. He put himself through college by mowing the white folks' lawns; but now he flies a private jet named Wings of Justice, wears a diamond-encrusted Rolex, and limbers up before entering the courtroom by shadow-boxing while singing along at the top of his voice to a Gospel choir called The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Nevertheless, he tells each jury that he's just a country boy. "If I just talk in plain ordinary talk, you won't hold that against me, will you?" The Canadian tycoon expects to lose $12 million at worst. Instead, the jury awards damages against him of $400 million.

The only drawback is that real life, as it often does, fell a little short in the plot department. This trial didn't twist and turn as an invented one would. I expect the defect will be rectified in the movie of the case: Warner Brothers have already optioned Funeral Wars. In the meantime, you read Jonathan Harr's book for the human circus of the thing.

Your Pedigree Chum, on the other hand, investigates a canine controversy-It's about the Missyplicity Project-an effort to clone a mongrel whose death her anonymous millionaire owners can't bear the thought of. So far $3.7 million has been spent without achieving the crucial step from successfully cloned embryo to living puppy. James Langton takes this genetic impasse, down on a Texan campus where it looks as if the students have already been cloned "using the healthiest specimens of young country-club Republicans", as his cue for a pleasing tour of dog history and dog science, deliberately coloured by his own history of happy dogownership. It is, in short, a blend of nicely etched observation and unrepentant who's-a-good-boy feeling. I'm not sure that Langton is totally master of the science involved, given his speculation that the cloned Missy may turn out to be a Mister - er, no - but he covers the dog years from the dawn of time to the Petri dish and the pipette; and he even offers a tentative identification of Missyplicity's secretive backer.

The most obviously distinguished of the three, in terms of both writing and observation, is of course Paul Theroux's Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks. Theroux's wonderfully supple portrait of the neurologist Oliver Sacks is taken as the doctor walks through Manhattan with his patient Shane, who has Tourette's Syndrome. Shane runs, darts, breaks into tics verbal and physical - "Hi, hi, hi", "Hup! Hup!" - while Dr Sacks ambles and observes, in a state of self-effacement which Theroux slyly undoes with his own observations. We watch the watching of this gentle omni-curious man, and we see that he is quietly setting up moments of connection with people for Shane, in line with his theory that solitary behaviour is monochrome, but encounters with others are shot through with different tints, and are far more diagnostically revealing.

The other portrait of Theroux's pair is compelling for much darker reasons. "Nurse Wolf" is a dominatrix; a hearty, healthy former cheerleader whose dungeon contains scalpels for "bloodplay" and sterilised needles for sewing buttons onto clients' skin. Even if none of this stuff has any personal resonance for you at all - if, as Theroux says of himself, "This talk of pain did nothing but turn my manhood into a peanut" - it still holds out the fascination of watching a sexual car-wreck, other people's desires going catastrophic.

You can see the link he wants you to make between these two very different kinds of therapist. When Nurse Wolf tells Theroux she cried over the death of a regular client, he says: "So it's almost like having a relationship." She corrects him: "It is a relationship."

Theroux is suggesting that both of them are in the business of achieving for people the illumination or release that's only available in relationship, in connection. But this seems rather too generic a resemblance, rather too applicable to any dominatrix and any neurologist, for it really to clinch this fine piece of writing in its contention that the two are somehow twinned; that they amount, as it were, to Dr Jekyll and Miss Hyde.