What do atoms have to do with your life? Millions of human beings have obviously lived their lives in the past without the faintest suspicion of the existence of atoms. In Your Atomic Self, scientist Curt Stager (http://www.curtstager.com/About__Biography_.html) reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe. Stager will show how your oxygen atoms move through […]
Val McDermid (http://www.valmcdermid.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_mcdermid) will need little introduction to her many fans or to the readers of these reviews. Her new stand alone book has been published in September of 2014 and the summary is as follows: When a skeleton is discovered hidden at the top of a crumbling, gothic building in Edinburgh, Detective Chief Inspector Karen
The news media in all its formats is saturated with reports of conflict and violence from around the world. A great deal of this violence is in the name of religion. Whole religious traditions as well as factions and sects within those traditions seek to assert their dominance over one another. Former Roman Catholic nun
Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong Read More »
It’s not often you find top ten best selling popular fiction set in Carluke. Yet here we have it in the latest outing from Quintin Jardine (http://www.quintinjardine.com/). This is a story of a man’s quest for justice at any cost. The summary is as follows. It’s 1818 in Carluke, Lanarkshire. Mathew Fleming returns home to
Andrew Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian)) would be the first to point out that there are already thousands of studies of Napoleon already in print (the British Library catalogue lists 13,000 items with the word ‘Napoleon’ in the title field). It takes some guts and ambition, therefore, to seek to add to that number. Fortunately we’re in the hands
Napoleon the Great Read More »
As J.D. Robb, prolific author Nora Roberts (http://www.nora-roberts.co.uk/) has published a series of futuristic science fiction police procedurals. These books, all part of the “In Death” series, feature NYPSD Detective Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke. They are set in a mid-21st century New York City. Despite the emphasis on solving a crime in each of the books, the
100,000 years ago, at least six species of humanoid inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Homo Sapiens. How did our species survive and prosper up to the position we hold today? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Read More »
Nothing is more natural than to believe we have conscious control over our own choices. Indeed most of social behaviour including the criminal justice system is predicated on that conviction. What, though, if that presumption is simply not true? Professor Dick Swabb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Swaab) argues that everything we think, do, and refrain from doing is determined by our
We Are Our Brains by Dick Swaab Read More »
Ruth Rendell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Rendell and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/ruth-rendell) is a phenomenally successful crime writer. She probes deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. She has (at the last count) 74 titles to her name covering crime novels, novellas, and short stories (some under the pen name of Barbara
The Girl Next Door Read More »
