Tracking the soul of the civil rights movement

If you read one book this week

"Scarecrow" by Matthew Pritchard (Salt Publishing) R190

As an elderly British couple watch their illegally built retirement home in Andalucia being demolished by local authorities, a wall cavity exposes a human corpse - and so begins an intriguing whodunit as overweight journalist Danny Sanchez follows a serial killer from Spain to Britain and back again. It's an excellent debut from Pritchard.

The Issue

Popular culture time: the Civil Rights Movement forms the backdrop to a number of new worthwhile American music biographies and histories. Pick of the bunch has to be Robert Gordon's Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, a gripping account of how, in the segregated Memphis of the early 1960s, a small independent record company - home to Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and Booker T & The MGs - became a model of racial harmony at a time of great upheaval in the southern US.

Greg Kot's forthcoming I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom's Highway could be seen as a companion piece to Gordon's book. The Staples' message-oriented soul provided a soundtrack to the Civil Rights era, inspiring Martin Luther King jnr himself. Kot's book, produced with his subject and her family's co-operation, reveals an intimate side to Staples and her 60-year career, one that is still going strong today. Sam Cooke was another great singer associated with King and Civil Rights.

In his brief career, he had more than 30 Top 40 hits, including the memorable A Change Is Gonna Come.

Peter Guralnick's acclaimed 2006 biography, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, will be reissued as a Kindle book later this year.

Readers interested in the movement, meanwhile, should check out Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King Jnr by David L Chappell.

It focuses on the years after King's assassination in 1968 and details the history of the struggle to keep his vision alive.

Crash Course

How does French president François Hollande do it? He's not exactly Adonis , but here he is, all ooh-la-la with Julie Gayet, notable feature in art movies, like some golden god. Well, a new book, Betsy Prioleau's Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them , reveals the secret of the small and ugly swine who punch above their weight in this department. And it is simply this: they are intelligent and creative. But you knew that, didn't you?

The Bottom line

"The arts translate life into film and literature and music and repeat a deadly poison: the monotonous in life must be protected at all costs. But protected from what? From you and I." - Autobiography by Morrissey (Penguin Classics)