Recent Reviews

13 October 2020 (499 words)

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

15 January 2020 (140)

*The Scent of Buenos Aires (Hebe Uhart)
- distinctive character-centred short stories

8 January 2020 (500)

**Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk)
- three centuries ago Janina would have been burned as a witch

11 December 2019 (316)

Strange Language (Mari Jose Olaziregi)
An Anthology of Basque Short Stories

10 December 2019 (1832)

How I Wish I'd Taught Maths (Craig Barton)
Lessons Learned from Research, Conversations with Experts, and 12 Years of Mistakes

20 November 2019 (520)

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House (Ambai)
- short stories celebrating the lives of Indian women

24 October 2019 (909)

*Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Gwendolyn Leick)
- ten cities over five millennia

1 October 2019 (651)

*A Change of Time (Ida Jessen)
- facing widowhood in a Danish country town

17 September 2019 (1310)

Bringing Words to Life (Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Linda Kucan)
Robust Vocabulary Instruction

5 September 2019 (826)

Who We Are and How We Got Here (David Reich)
Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
Ancestral Journeys (Jean Manco)
The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings

23 July 2019 (513)

*How To Fold It (Joseph O'Rourke)
The Mathematics of Linkages, Origami, and Polyhedra

17 July 2019 (360)

*Obabakoak (Bernardo Atxaga)
- a metafictional short story collection

11 July 2019 (269)

An English Murder (Cyril Hare)
- a classic murder mystery with a political twist

1 July 2019 (737)

Many Ramayanas (Paula Richman)
The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia

10 June 2019 (739)

Agents of Empire (Noel Malcolm)
Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World

7 June 2019 (657)

*The Passage to Europe (Luuk Van Middelaar)
How a Continent Became a Union

25 May 2019 (498)

The Indo-European Controversy (Asya Pereltsvaig, Martin W. Lewis)
Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics

23 May 2019 (1493)

*The Horse, The Wheel, and Language (David W. Anthony)
How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

10 April 2019 (758)

*The Future of Fusion Energy (Jason Parisi, Justin Ball)
- the science, engineering, history and politics

25 March 2019 (320)

The Enlightened Economy (Joel Mokyr)
Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850

Full chronological listing (long)