This novel by Amitav Ghosh (https://amitavghosh.com/bio.html) charts the lives of Rajkumar Raha and his family, starting in Mandalay, where he finds himself stranded when the sampan he is working on breaks down. Rajkumar stays on as a restaurant worker, and witnesses the British depose and deport the last king of Burma, Thebaw, and his family, […]
A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, acting as a corrective to the official version of history taught in schools (with its emphasis on great men in high places), to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Since first publication in 1980 this book has been
A People’s History of the United States Read More »
Some works of scholarship are so monumental and have been so influential that they are worth reading 70 years after publication. Published just after the Second World War in 1948, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (translated from German) is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place.
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages Read More »
Should you wish to refresh your understanding of meteorites, this guide is to be recommended. Meteorite research shows us about the origin and early history of the Solar System. Robert Hutchison considers the mechanism and timing of core formation and basaltic volcanism on asteroids, and the effects of heating water-rich bodies. Results from meteorite research are
Christopher Hitchens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens) died at the age of 62 on 15th December 2011. The cause of death was pneumonia brought on by esophageal cancer. He had been highly productive writer, polemicist and debater. He had also been a heavy smoker and drinker. This book includes the six elegant pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair chronicling his illness
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Read More »
Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Dubois) is not nearly as well known as his most important scientific contribution. Dubois’s 1892 archaeological expedition found the first fossil evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus (what we know today as homo erectus, http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus) or ‘Java man’. At the time of its discovery, P. erectus was viewed by many scientists as the
The Man Who Found the Missing Link by Pat Shipman Read More »
It is a terrible shame that a creative civilisation like Islam can come to be so backward and identified now in the international media with extremist violence. Islam did, in fact, contribute much to world culture and civilisation. Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in
Something’s happening in your brain when you sense beauty, just as something’s happening in your brain when you eat a chocolate biscuit. One would like to think there is more to looking at a masterpiece by Titian than chewing a Jaffa Cake. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gabrielle_Starr) argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of
Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out – a global catastrophe far greater than the extinction of dinosaurs 185 million years later. Scientists are slowly working out how this happened and there are many competing theories. Some blame
