As a prolific author, BBC commentator, and magazine editor, Nigel Calder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Calder) has spent a lifetime spotting and explaining the big discoveries in all branches of science. In Magic Universe, he draws on his vast experience to offer readers a lively, far-reaching look at modern science in all its glory, shedding light on the latest ideas […]
Thriller, beast-fable and fantasy, Evie Wyld’s (http://www.eviewyld.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evie_Wyld ) second novel is a sparky, dark yarn set in a georgic world of sheep husbandry where things have gone spectacularly awry. A double narrative runs between an unnamed island off the British coast and prior action in Australia. All the Birds, Singing (2013) opens with the discovery of
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The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, ‘would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.’ James Gleick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gleick and http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Glei) has just this perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, The
Starving children who eat vomit and a prisoner chewing through one of his own arteries in an attempt to escape torture were among the horrors on show in Nadeem Aslam’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadeem_Aslam and http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/jan/26/nadeem-aslam-life-in-writing) previous novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan amid the rise and fall of the Taliban. In his new book we find children forced to drink urine and
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Iain Banks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks and http://www.iain-banks.net/) died on 9 June 2013. Diagnosed with terminal cancer of the gallbladder he wittily asked his long term partner Adele if she would do him the honour of becoming his widow (http://www.iain-banks.net/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-iain-banks/). He has left multitudes of grieving fans. In the fifth book in the ‘Culture’ series, published 1996, he offers us
Burial Rites (2013) is the work of an Australian who visited Iceland on a cultural exchange. Based on a true 19th-century story, this powerful book has the stark and tragic tone of the sagas, where a veneer of Christianity cannot conceal a bleak and stoic belief in the workings of fate. Old superstitions are rife, and
Alan Warner (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/life-in-writing-alan-warner and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Warner) gives us this peculiarly Scottish tale of purposelessness and amorality set in the 1980s. For it he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Maugham_Award). Morvern Callar, a low-paid young woman in the local supermarket of a desolate and beautiful port town (Oban??) in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find
Ian Rankin (http://www.ianrankin.net/) is on top form with the 8th in the Inspector Rebus series. This detective novel is full of wit, style and intricacy. Bible John killed three women, and took three souvenirs. Johnny Bible killed to steal his namesake’s glory. Oilman Allan Mitchelson died for his principles. And convict Lenny Spaven died just to prove
Antonio Damasio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio and http://www.ted.com/speakers/antonio_damasio.html) does not claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is fortunate, because in many senses Damasio’s book does not provide much new information about consciousness and why its highest forms occur only in humans. Instead, Damasio
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