Jesmyn Ward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesmyn_Ward) won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her 2011 book ‘Salvage the Bones’. Her 2017 novel is Sing, Unburied, Sing describes a black woman and her two children driving to a prison to pick up their white father. We are introduced to the convict’s son, Jojo, who has been forced to shoulder […]
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William J Broad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Broad) offers this fascinating history of oceanography. He points out the roll of the military in developing new technologies within that field. By 1957, the US Navy was searching for new weaponry to use in undersea warfare; a decade later, it had established a global network of deep microphones that spied on
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The way we see the world is radically different from our medieval forebears. How was this transition made? How did we exchange organised superstition for a science of the world based on evidence, experimentation, prediction and control? Jonathan Israel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Israel) here offers a magisterial study of what became known as ‘The Enlightenment’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/). Israel lauds
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Demographers have long predicted that our society is going to have to cope with an ageing population. In recent years the reality has hit home with The National Health Service and Social Care services under immense pressure. Along with this, dementia has risen to epidemic proportions (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25213162) Helen Small (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Small) takes as her topic here
This book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common across the galaxies, complex intelligent life requires an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and must be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics
Much of what’s going on in human life is the exercise of power. Individuals struggle to assert power over one another, and groups of individuals (up to the scale of nations) collaborate to do likewise. Fig leaf labels are pasted over the nasty business as camouflage such as ‘communism’, ‘christianity’, ‘islam’, ‘national socialism’, ‘the british
Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris describe an aspect of human perception known as ‘inattentional blindness’. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track carefully of how many times basketball players tossed the ball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the court in plain view,
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First published in 1939 this classic study of the end of the Roman Republic still contains a wealth of scholarship for contemporary readers. The central thesis is that a political revolution occurred which transformed the Roman city state into a Imperial power, capable of fully developing its Empire and utilising the resources of the subjugated
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The Liberal Party in Britain is at a low ebb in its fortunes with a tiny number of MPs in the Commons at the start of 2018. Behind the poor showing, though, stands a tradition which, arguably, has brought in more positive social change to Britain than any other. Should you wish to read up
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Some books of history have been so ground breaking and influential that they demand a place in your library even if they are decades old themselves and the period has been covered more recently. Peter Brown’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brown_(historian)) The World of Late Antiquity, published in 1971, is one such. The period in question (AD 150-750) had
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My Absolute Darling (2017) is a debut novel from Garbiel Tallent (http://www.bookweb.org/news/qa-gabriel-tallent-author-1-indie-next-list-pick-september-37140) describing a horribly tainted love. Both a Times and a Guardian Book of the Year 2017, it has attracted many plaudits. See here if you could set aside the time for it. At 14 years old Turtle Alveston is a crack shot with
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Humans get used to the benefits of new technology fast. There is an entire generation alive today (born since 1989) which has never known a world without the Internet or the instantly gratifying means of digital communication delivered by portable devices. Life is hardly imaginable without the kit. As with most things in human life,
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Middle-class, midwest suburban family life is Celeste Ng’s (https://www.celesteng.com/about/) subject matter in this recent novel. It concerns motherhood, surrogacy, abortion and adoption, and the narrative traces the events which lead to the tragedy of a raging house fire. The Richardson family owns a large picture-perfect house in Cleveland’s progressive Shaker Heights neighbourhood. It has four cars in the
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In the last few years we’ve become accustomed to lies, distortion, pick n’ mix ‘facts’ and ‘fake news’ splashing around like an angry Falls of Clyde. Lies, falsity, religion and superstition have existed for as long as conscious minds, of course. The new twist is the ubiquity of instant means of digital communication. The trap is
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Waking up on New Year 2018 may have brought some random thoughts like ‘Oh! God’, ‘Why me?’ ‘Why here?’, accompanied by a general sense of apprehension. Pressing the doubt and unease further may lead to a question which has troubled many for centuries, namely ‘Why is there Anything rather than just Nothing?’ The question was
Why there is Something rather than Nothing by Bede Rundle Read More »
