Recent Reviews

14 July 2021 (640 words)

The Miracle Pill (Peter Walker)
Why a sedentary world is getting it all wrong

23 June 2021 (211)

Everything Like Before (Kjell Askildsen)
- stories of estrangement and misunderstanding

6 June 2021 (265)

*Tokyo Ueno Station (Yu Miri)
- down and out in Tokyo and Fukushima

18 May 2021 (659)

*Jellyfish: A Natural History (Lisa-Ann Gershwin)
- a fascinating survey with stunning photos

27 April 2021 (539)

Viruses, Plagues, and History (Michael B. A. Oldstone)
Past, Present, and Future
Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Dorothy H. Crawford)

15 April 2021 (540)

Across the Bridge (Henry Gee)
Understanding the Origin of the Vertebrates

29 March 2021 (547)

Turning Points (Mark A. Noll)
Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

24 March 2021 (576)

Salt Water (Josep Pla)
- stories of the north Catalan coast

1 March 2021 (796)

Mathematics in Ancient Egypt (Annette Imhausen)
A Contextual History

4 February 2021 (988)

**Army Ants (Daniel J.C. Kronauer)
Nature's Ultimate Social Hunters

2 February 2021 (607)

Lying For Money (Dan Davies)
How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World

11 January 2021 (218)

*The Writer's Map (Huw Lewis-Jones)
An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

4 January 2021 (441)

*Trees: Their Natural History (Peter A. Thomas)
- the challenges of being a tree

4 January 2021 (128)

*Difficult Light (Tomás González)
- age and memory; pain, suffering, love and joy

7 December 2020 (228)

Beyond Global Warming (Syukuro Manabe, Anthony J. Broccoli)
How Numerical Models Revealed the Secrets of Climate Change

30 November 2020 (301)

*Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Apostolos Doxiadis)
- a novel of obsession and mathematics

25 November 2020 (598)

Transport Matters (Iain Docherty, Jon Shaw)
- seventeen essays on a range of UK issues

19 November 2020 (581)

State and Religion in China (Anthony C. Yu)
Historical and Textual Perspectives

11 November 2020 (250)

The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War (Serge Pey)
- powerful stories of childhood and exile

13 October 2020 (499)

Elements of Mathematics: From Euclid to Gödel (John Stillwell)
- "elementary" and its boundary with "advanced"

2 October 2020 (292)

*Iran: A Modern History (Abbas Amanat)
- from the Safavids to the Islamic Revolution

25 September 2020 (672)

Building the Cycling City (Melissa Bruntlett, Chris Bruntlett)
The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality

12 September 2020 (537)

End of the Megafauna (Ross D. E. MacPhee)
The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals

9 September 2020 (789)

Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories (Michael Bird)
A Children's History of Art
A Journey Through Art (Aaron Rosen)
A Global History

8 September 2020 (1091)

Mastery in Primary Mathematics (Tom Garry)
- a mastery approach to teaching mathematics teaching
Mastery Mathematics for Primary Teachers (Robert Newell)

29 July 2020 (378)

*Visual Complex Analysis (Tristram Needham)
- a genuinely geometric perspective

22 July 2020 (316)

Babel (Gaston Dorren)
Around the World in Twenty Languages

6 July 2020 (680)

Children's Picturebooks (Martin Salisbury, Morag Styles)
The Art of Visual Storytelling

10 June 2020 (678)

Life: The First Four Billion Years (Martin Jenkins)
- an illustrated overview for children
A World of Plants (Martin Jenkins)
- a children's introduction to botany

5 June 2020 (499)

Beautiful Geometry (Eli Maor, Eugen Jost)
- art illustrating classical results
Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations (Stephen Ornes)
- the maths behind some contemporary art + artists
Bilder der Mathematik (Georg Glaeser, Konrad Polthier)
- visualisation for understanding

27 May 2020 (920)

The Invisible Killer (Gary Fuller)
The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution and How We Can Fight Back
Clearing the Air (Tim Smedley)
The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution

21 May 2020 (291)

The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons (Jean Manco)
Decoding the Ancestry of the English

5 May 2020 (238)

The Stolen Bicycle (Wu Ming-Yi)
- a spiralling exploration of memory and history in Taiwan

24 April 2020 (484)

Music by the Numbers (Eli Maor)
From Pythagoras to Schoenberg

10 April 2020 (291)

The Doll's Alphabet (Camilla Grudova)
- dark and grimy but strangely uplifting short stories

7 April 2020 (431)

*Darwin's Rival (Christiane Dorion, Harry Tennant)
Alfred Russel Wallace and the Search for Evolution

27 March 2020 (563)

Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Svetlana Alexievich)
- twenty oral histories from 1991 to 2012

17 March 2020 (937)

*Until the Lions: Echoes From The Mahabharata (Karthika Naïr)
- poetry with subaltern perspectives within the Indian epic

16 March 2020 (615)

The Armourer's House (Rosemary Sutcliff)
- an eight year old moves to Henry VIII's London

24 February 2020 (372)

The Hills Reply (Tarjei Vesaas)
- prose poetry, coming of age in Norwegian landscapes

18 February 2020 (447)

Animal Science (Nicola Davies)
Poo; Extreme Animals; What's Eating You?; Just the Right Size; Talk, Talk, Squawk!; Deadly!

10 February 2020 (880)

**Arithmetic (Paul Lockhart)
- a deep look at elementary mathematics

Full chronological listing (long)