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Your reviewer took Physics A-level in 1992 and hasn't really touched it since. Helen Czerski has written the kind of book that she wishes had been a textbook, but couldn't really be, but which helps traverse the yawning chasm between what one studies and what happens in real life around...

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Despite some quotes on its cover, books about being a committed single woman are probably something of a niche. For context this reviewer--like Kate Bolick--has never married, is childless, and in somewhat retro-fashion likes to prefix herself as Miss where applicable. Bolick (in her 43rd...

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This is the third Gary Klein book your reviewer has read, and is the second one that she perceives to be a general assault on the love of rules and data-based decision making that permeates business life, government and much professional activity. Klein asserts he is not the enemy of such...

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This isn’t a self-help book, though it looked to this reviewer as if it was inside the cover of one. Rather, Professor Gilbert of Harvard University writes about supposed deficiencies of the human brain, though always within a context of how vital these are to survival. And survival is...

The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights

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The world is a competitive place. Species perish, organisations fail, and stuff kills folks. On the upside, some people excel, some firms flourish, and societies make permanent advancements. Examining part of how the latter side happens is the quest of Gary Klein, a research...

Why having too little means so much

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This reviewer wondered whether Scarcity should be a movie sequel to Scarface, except that Tony Montana was killed off in the original. Hence it is behavioural economics instead. She also wondered whether it was really a whole book in itself, rather than what could have been a chapter out of...

How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose

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This wonderful book starts with a discussion of the cuckoo bird who will place one of its eggs in the nest of another bird with similar, yet smaller, eggs. The other bird will then devote its attention to the cuckoo egg since it is bigger. supernormal stimuli, such as this example can be...

The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

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This book's title would ordinarily have led this reviewer to believe she was about to read an anti-business tirade about the subjugation of government and democracy to the superior power of big business, replete with lists of how many corporations had market capitalisation as big as medium...

The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour

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This reviewer picked up "Sway" at a shop in order to complete a three-for-two deal ("It's free, yippee, and that should make me more happy about paying cover price for the other two shouldn't it, huh?") and wondered whether its contents would illuminate the irrational bias that...

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How much do we REALLY know about William Shakespeare?

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The author lived in, and laid bare the status-driven world. Each of the seven chapters is a keenly observed profile of the art world's highest echelons: a Christie's auction, a crit session at the California Institute of the Arts, Art Basel art fair, the Turner Prize jurying, ArtForum magazine,...

A witty review of past and present research of ghosts and the soul.

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A humor filled book of Mary Roach's search through ghostly research endeavors of the past, and discussions with those who claim to be present-day paranormal researchers.

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The late Steve Allen authored two collections of essays after reading Gideon Bibles in hundreds of hotels.

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A history of the development of the telescope and the current trends and developments.

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This volume recounts the natural history of the Earth and the evolution of life on Earth. It considers the evolutionary reasons for human and animal behaviors.