Recent Reviews

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)