Recent Reviews

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2 February 2012 (818 words)
One Illness Away (Anirudh Krishna)
Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty
29 January 2012 (738)
1788: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (Watkin Tench)
+ A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
31 December 2011 (387)
German: A Linguistic Introduction (Sarah M.B. Fagan)
- language structure, history, and contemporary use
14 December 2011 (632)
*Metropole (Ferenc Karinthy)
- trapped in a crowded city with an incomprehensible language
12 December 2011 (1348)
The Long Thaw (David Archer)
How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate
9 December 2011 (257)
Oliver VII (Antal Szerb)
- a slight but charming entertainment
5 December 2011 (453)
The Elements of Graphing Data (William S. Cleveland)
- effective graphical presentation of data
28 November 2011 (1986)
**The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin)
- the great Chinese novel, aka The Dream of the Red Chamber
26 November 2011 (327)
*Savushun (Simin Daneshvar)
A Novel About Modern Iran
21 November 2011 (1579)
**Microeconomics (Samuel Bowles)
Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution
11 November 2011 (1027)
The Development of Atmospheric General Circulation Models (Donner, Schubert, Somerville)
Complexity, Synthesis and Computation
10 November 2011 (901)
The Wandering Who? (Gilad Atzmon)
A Study of Jewish Identity Politics
6 November 2011 (441)
*Population Genetics (John H. Gillespie)
A Concise Guide
30 October 2011 (1708)
Higher Speculations (Helge Kragh)
Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology
21 October 2011 (547)
*An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears)
- murder, espionage and controversy in Restoration Oxford
14 October 2011 (1220)
Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (James A. Shapiro)
- natural genetic engineering and the read-write genome
3 October 2011 (675)
Oxford (Jan Morris)
- a potpourri of information about the town and university
22 September 2011 (771)
*The Making of the British Landscape (Francis Pryor)
How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today
20 September 2011 (424)
Last Rites (Michael Hampson)
The End of the Church of England
13 September 2011 (307)
A Brief History of the Normans (François Neveux)
The Conquests that Changed the Face of Europe
22 August 2011 (1682)
Empires of the Silk Road (Christopher I. Beckwith)
A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
19 August 2011 (226)
*Ferdydurke (Witold Gombrowicz)
- a comedy of pedagogy and identity
18 August 2011 (870)
*Schooling in Western Europe (Mary Jo Maynes)
- the introduction of mass elementary education
12 August 2011 (760)
Religions of the Silk Road (Richard Foltz)
Premodern Patterns of Globalization
9 August 2011 (364)
The Bad Book Affair (Ian Sansom)
- social comedy in a northern Ireland backwater
3 August 2011 (538)
An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire (Kate Tiller, Giles Darkes)
- from prehistory to the present
29 July 2011 (523)
The Shannon Scheme (Andy Bielenberg)
and the Electrification of the Irish Free State
25 July 2011 (422)
Ireland: A History (Thomas Bartlett)
- a lucid and engaging narrative account
19 July 2011 (375)
*Amongst Women (John McGahern)
- an Irish novel of a family and its frictions
15 July 2011 (429)
Irish Flour Milling (Andy Bielenberg)
A History 600-2000
12 July 2011 (208)
Niki: The Story of a Dog (Tibor Déry)
- a family and a dog in post-war Hungary
24 June 2011 (776)
Digital Atlas of Indonesian History (Robert Cribb)
- an updated electronic version of the printed atlas
18 June 2011 (870)
Buddhism in the Modern World (Steven Heine, Charles S. Prebish)
Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition
14 June 2011 (777)
Indochina (Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery)
An Ambiguous Colonization 1858-1954
12 June 2011 (210)
The Spare Room (Helen Garner)
- a novel about coming to terms with death and dying
11 June 2011 (276)
Talking about Detective Fiction (P.D. James)
- a brief history and overview of the genre
6 June 2011 (317)
Strike for a Kingdom (Menna Gallie)
- a mystery set in a Welsh mining village in 1926
28 May 2011 (1466)
The Elusive Malaria Vaccine: Miracle or Mirage? (Irwin W. Sherman)
- a century of immunological research
25 May 2011 (317)
The Arabian Nightmare (Robert Irwin)
- a novel of dream and story in medieval Cairo
20 May 2011 (623)
*Mr. Mani (A.B. Yehoshua)
- linked stories about a Jewish lineage
16 May 2011 (324)
A Tranquil Star (Primo Levi)
- realistic and fantastic short stories
12 May 2011 (224)
A Country Doctor's Notebook (Mikhail Bulgakov)
- stories of medical work in rural Russia in 1917

Full chronological listing (long)