Food is transcendental. All cultures venerate it, a shared meal is the universal symbol of hospitality, the business of food shapes our entire planet. This book was originally written in the 1980s and updated in the 1990s - but it is a timeless classic. Visser talks us through how a simple meal came to be, its history, and its consequences. Much Depends on Dinner, the chronicle of a simple meal, includes therefore the consideration of massive modern environmental problems, as well as the…
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Is it possible to write a time-travel story which makes sense? Probably not - but this comes close! It's a bit of a slow-burn; not revealing its secrets until it is good and ready. If you've read a lot of time-hopping sci-fi you won't find anything too surprising; nothing can escape the long shadow of La Jetée. It is a lushly plotted and surprisingly prosaic look at the reality of living on the moon and investigating the nature of reality. Even for a sci-fi book, I found some of the leaps a …
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The best thing about Shakespeare is that you can endlessly redefine the stories. Romeo & Juliet works as well set in NYC to a musical score as it does set in fair Verona. The Tempest is just as good whether the action takes place on an island or an alien planet. Shakespeare can be set in any number of high-schools without dampening its power. And so, Hamlet is now HAM(let) - Humanoid Artificial Mind (learned emotive type) - with V1 being the dead king and V2 our titular Danish Prince. …
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Was the polymath John von Neumann an alien? Did he travel back in time to help us invent the future? Or was he just a complex man with a knack for building networks of interesting people? Ananyo Bhattacharya's well-researched book presents a tangled view of the man and his legend. It leaps back and forth between von Neumann's various projects, which can make it slightly confusing to follow. Although it does its best to simplify the maths and science to a lay audience, there's no getting away…
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My friend Dr Joanna has written a marvellous book! Full of bone-eating snot flowers, stuffed with silly footnotes about antlions, and gorgeously illustrated. This is a quick rattle through over a hundred weird - and not-so-weird - animals. It is always amusing and occasionally gross. Banana Slugs, man... YEUCH! It is surprisingly adult in places, probably best for older teens who will snigger at the penis fencing and fart jokes. Of course, sophisticated adults like me find that sort of…
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World War 2 was won by many men with big guns and feats of daring-do. Sure, the boffins in Bletchley might have helped a bit - but it was bombs, muscles, and blokes which saved the day. Well, that's what we're all taught, right? Would it surprise you to learn that a significant contributor to Victory in Europe was a woman? Britain's first "James Bond" wasn't a suave man leaping from building to building. She was a one-legged American woman who used her wit and cunning to help lay the…
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I don't usually back Kickstarter campaigns - but I love sci-fi & fantasy, and I don't think I've previously read any from Ukraine. So this was an instant buy - and it is a delight. As with any translation, you have to accept that the phrasing may sound a little "foreign" and you won't immediately get all the idioms and references - but that's all part of the fun, right? A tiny drumming sound grew alongside him, like chubby old fingers on glass, like rain on a coffin. He would here die, too, …
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People who fart about with computers like to give themselves highfalutin titles. We're not programmers; we're architects! Yeah, nah. I wish I knew who recommended this book to me so that I could properly thank them. It is an astonishing series of life lessons viewed through the lens of architecture. Even to a lay-person like me, it was an accessible work - helped by Brand's friendly and unpretentious demeanour. It is chock-full of photos with lots of before-and-after shots - to the point…
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I did not get on well with this story. I know every novel has to be about The Pandemic, but this feels like it really wants to hammer home that Boris Johnson wasn't an especially good PM. I mean, yeah, we lived it. We know. At its heart, a story about how a family survives from the Second World War until the end of Covid might be interesting. It pops back and forth in time. It flips between diary entries and third party storytelling. But it is just so dull and trite. I found the foreshadowing …
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As the Middle-East convulses in yet another bloody war, and with no end in sight to the barbarity, we're all looking for a way to understand the horrors unfolding. So I went searching in the past. What set the seeds of today's conflict and was there any way to prevent it? This is a dispassionate and, it has to be said, dry look at how the British intelligence agencies operated in the region during the aftermath of the 2nd world war. The books makes the compelling case that the UK's obsession …
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Imagine a world with inter-city rockets, where tourists still use film cameras. Where self-driving trucks sport a wide array of sensor apparatus and record all their data onto miles of magnetic tape. Where the latest Androids are life-like and can perfectly clone a dead man's speech, yet are powered by punch-cards. People make video calls from public booths which eagerly accept coins as payment. At the heart of nearly every story is paranoia and poor mental health. Perhaps I am a robot? Or…
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This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. There's also a sweet moral core to the story - as well as the somewhat saddening death of naïvety. It's hard to overstate just how fun this book …
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