In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Eula Biss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eula_Biss and http://eulabiss.net/) unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition, […]
Elizabeth Kolbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert and http://elizabethkolbert.com/) reports from the front lines of the violent collision between human civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50
The Sixth Extinction Read More »
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald ) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower (first published 1995), was acclaimed as a work
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Martina Cole (http://www.martinacole.co.uk/) was born and brought up in Essex. She is the bestselling author of fourteen novels set in London’s gangland, and her most recent three paperbacks have gone straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times on first publication. Total sales of Martina’s novels stand at over eight million copies. The summary of her
With the growing popularity of Zen Buddhism in the West, virtually everyone knows, or thinks they know, what a koan is: a brief and baffling question or statement that cannot be solved by the logical mind and which, after sustained concentration, can lead to sudden enlightenment. But the truth about koans is both simpler—and more
Opening a Mountain by Steven Heine Read More »
Are you looking for a Christmas present in the form of a book? Here is one that almost anyone could enjoy – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It’s January 1946. London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Read More »
The power of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is beyond doubt, explaining how useful adaptations are preserved over generations. But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded him: how those adaptations arise in the first place. Can random mutations over a mere 3.8 billion years solely be responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, photosynthesis, and the rest
The Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner Read More »
Elly Griffiths (http://www.ellygriffiths.co.uk/) was born in London. The inpsiration for her books about forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway came from her husband who gave up a city job to train as an archaeologist. Elly Griffiths lives near Brighton but draws inspiration from the wild Norfolk coast. The summary of her latest detective story is as follows. It’s Brighton in 1950.
Here is a really meaty read in moral philosophy. It asks what are virtue and vice, and how do they relate to other moral properties such as goodness and rightness? Thomas Hurka, Professor of Philosophy at Toronto, (http://thomashurka.com/) defends a distinctive ‘perfectionist’ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perfectionism-moral/) view according to which the virtues are higher-level intrinsic goods, ones that involve morally
Virtue, Vice and Value by Thomas Hurka Read More »
