Penguin

Book Reviews

• *The Age of Extremes (Eric Hobsbawm)
  The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
• Agents of Empire (Noel Malcolm)
  Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World
• *The Alexander Trilogy (Mary Renault)
  - Alexander the Great's childhood and final years; conflicts after his death
• The Anatomy of Fascism (Robert O. Paxton)
  - a historical approach
• *Animal Farm (George Orwell)
  - political allegory in a farmyard fable
• The Arabian Nightmare (Robert Irwin)
  - a novel of dream and story in medieval Cairo
• *The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
  The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Body of Glass (Marge Piercy)
  - original cyberpunk sf
• Brainchildren (Daniel C. Dennett)
  Essays on Designing Minds
• *Bully for Brontosaurus (Stephen Jay Gould)
  Further Reflections in Natural History
• Climbing Mount Improbable (Richard Dawkins)
  - a popular introduction to evolution
• *Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett)
  - assorted bogeymen are summarily dispatched
• Count Belisarius (Robert Graves)
  - a historical novel about Justinian's great general
• *Crimes Against Humanity (Geoffrey Robertson)
  The Struggle for Global Justice
• *Darwin (Adrian Desmond, James Moore)
  - a narrative biography, in the context of social and scientific change
• The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
  - a policeman in hospital takes up the case of Richard III
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (David Hume)
• *The Discovery of Heaven (Harry Mulisch)
  - a large but lively novel of ideas
• The Dragon Scroll (I.J. Parker)
  - a murder mystery set in ancient Japan
• *Early Intelligence (Lise Eliot)
  How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
• **The Earthsea Trilogy (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of Atuan; The Farthest Shore
• Embers (Sándor Márai)
  - looking back at the intensities and obsessions of youth
• The Emperor (Ryszard Kapuscinski)
  - the end of Haile Selassie and his court
• The Enlightened Economy (Joel Mokyr)
  Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850
• *The Epic of Gilgamesh (Andrew George)
• Fearful Symmetry (Ian Stewart, Martin Golubitsky)
  Is God a Geometer?
• From Brains to Consciousness (Steven Rose)
  Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind
• The Girl in a Swing (Richard Adams)
• Goodbye to All That (Robert Graves)
  - an autobiography at thirty: from public school to the Great War
• Helena (Evelyn Waugh)
  - a dull and tendentiously Catholic novel about Constantine's mother
• A History of New Zealand (Keith Sinclair)
  - a classic, with five editions since 1959
• A History of Wales (John Davies)
  - a dense but rewarding narrative
• Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
  - a volunteer's first-hand account of the Spanish civil war
• *If Not Now, When? (Primo Levi)
  - a novel of Jewish partisans in Russia and Poland in WWII
• In a Free State (V.S. Naipaul)
  - stories about individuals in foreign countries, coping with alien cultures
• Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Daniel C. Dennett)
  - meaning, evolution, consciousness, and free will
• The Language Instinct (Steven Pinker)
  The New Science of Language and Mind
• Language Myths (Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill)
  - 21 common misconceptions about language corrected
• Language Play (David Crystal)
  - by adults and children
• *The Legends of Khasak (O.V. Vijayan)
  - interwoven stories of life and death in a South Indian village
• Lifelines (Steven Rose)
  Biology, Freedom, Determinism
• Maia (Richard Adams)
  - epic fantasy
• *The Making of the British Landscape (Francis Pryor)
  How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today
• Max Havelaar (Multatuli)
  Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company
• Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (Christopher de Hamel)
  - the histories and lives of twelve medieval books
• *Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Gwendolyn Leick)
  - ten cities over five millennia
• The Murder Room (P.D. James)
  - a Dalgliesh mystery: classical detective fiction
• The New Penguin History of Scotland (R.A. Houston, W.W.J. Knox)
  From the Earliest Times to the Present Day
• The Painter of Signs (R.K. Narayan)
  - infatuation and commitment in small town India
• Parallel Text German Short Stories (Richard Newnham)
  German Short Stories 1; German Short Stories 2; Short Stories in German
• Penguin Atlas of African History (Colin McEvedy)
• The Penguin History of Canada (Kenneth McNaught)
  - politicians, parties, wars, constitutional changes, ...
• Penguin Portrait (Steve Hare)
  Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors 1935-1970
• Postwar (Tony Judt)
  A History of Europe Since 1945
• The Pursuit of Italy (David Gilmour)
  A History of a Land, Its Regions and Their Peoples
• Quiddities (W.V. Quine)
  An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary
• The Raw and the Cooked (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
  Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 1
• The Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell)
  - mining towns, class and socialism in 1930s Britain
• *Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky)
• The Sadeian Woman (Angela Carter)
  And the Ideology of Pornography
• The Scars of Evolution (Elaine Morgan)
  What Our Bodies Tell Us about Human Origins
• *The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
  - a novel about a classical Greek class in an American college
• The Shout and Other Stories (Robert Graves)
  - English, Roman, and Majorcan stories
• Small World (David Lodge)
  - an academic comedy, parodying literary theories
• **The Sorrow of Belgium (Hugo Claus)
  - an adolescence in Flanders during World War II
• The Spirit Level (Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett)
  Why Equality is Better for Everyone
• **The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin)
  - the great Chinese novel, aka The Dream of the Red Chamber
• *Therapy (David Lodge)
  - a sitcom script-writer suffers a mid-life crisis
• *This Blinding Absence of Light (Tahar ben Jelloun)
  - surviving incarceration in a secret Moroccan prison
• **This Earth of Mankind (Pramoedya Ananta Toer)
  - the Buru Quartet: novels of colonial Indonesia
• *Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
• Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Stephen Jay Gould)
  Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
• *The Total Library (Jorge Luis Borges)
  Non-Fiction 1922-1986
• *Train to Pakistan (Khushwant Singh)
  - one of the classic novels of Partition
• Very Good, Jeeves! (P.G. Wodehouse)
• The View from Afar (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
  - essays and talks on topics anthropological
• War Trash (Ha Jin)
  - the story of a Chinese prisoner-of-war in Korea
• Wonderful Life (Stephen Jay Gould)
  The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
• The Worldly Philosophers (Robert Heilbroner)
  The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers