Category: Books

I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages. A For Andromeda was famously first a BBC science fiction series from 1961 starring Julie Christie. Sadly, as is the way of these things, barely any footage remains of the original seven part series, with the exception of a recently recovered copy of part six. Those…

A couple of years or so ago, I read Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them which took aim at the conservative right wing broadcast media. In many respects this is just too easy to do, but then they stay on the air, and millions of Americans listen and watch them. This…

Bill Carter is a TV writer on the New York Times who previously wrote a book called The Late Shift which detailed the events surrounding the battle between Jay Leno and David Letterman to take over The Tonight Show on NBC. Obviously, this didn’t have an exactly massive impact in the UK, although the TV…

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s Security Correspondent, who was shot five times and nearly killed in Saudi Arabia in 2004. His cameraman, Simon Cumbers, who was filming with him at the time, did not survive the attack. Gardner opens his biography with that attack – no waiting around until page 300 for the inevitable. Now…

One of my favourite books, and possibly my first Douglas Coupland novel, was Microserfs published back in 1995. jPod is essentially a sequel. Not in the sense that it has the same characters. But in everything else it is. Except that we’re all older and wiser. Well not the characters. They’re still mid-twenties to, maybe,…

Now a general rule of thumb I’ll always make when deciding if I’m going to read a book is this: if Davina McCall gives the book a ringing endorsement, then it’s probably not for me. (As an aside, I learn with shock that some publishers are actually embossing the Richard & Judy Bookclub logo on…

This is the book for which Indriðason won the CWA Gold Dagger award last year. I enjoyed the first book in the series, Tainted Blood (or previously, Jar City), and the return of police detective Erlendur is welcome. As before, he’s struggling with his private life. He lives alone, but his dug-addicted daughter has miscarried…

This book comes garlanded with awards – it’s the FT business book of the year, and the author’s won many a Pulitzer prize. In short it’s a book about globalisation, although that’s far too simplistic a word to truly explain what Friedman’s getting at. The “Flatness” of the world that he’s talking about is the…

Incendiary had the misfortune, last year, to be published in hardback on July 8. I must admit that I thought that it was a run of the mill thriller. Well I couldn’t have been more wrong. Obviously the cover isn’t really right, and the book is about 200 pages shorter than the average thriller. The…

First of all, it’s probably worth pointing out that this book is Science Fiction. It’s not immediately obvious from the cover that it is, but publishers are nervous of “condemning” a novel by a mainstream author into the ghetto that is genre fiction. The story is narrated by Kathy from some time in the future,…

I can’t remember precisely how I first came across Richard Feynman, but I’m pretty sure it was reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. Later, I’d see one of the best hours of Horizon ever made in Christopher Sykes’ The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. But aside from a couple of other documentaries, and famously his…

Michio Kaku is one busy guy. When he’s not presenting a weekly programme on US radio, he’s presenting a four part BBC series on Time. In the meantime we’ve got this book, who’s subtitle is The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. What we get is a whistlestop tour through basic…

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History to give the book its full title, explains how one of the most famous tricks on earth has actually never existed yet has continued to develop a life of its own. Let me direct you to a great review from a last…