On the surface, a beautifully written story of a distinguished retired lawyer coping with the death of his wife. But what gripped and moved me were its deeper, ever more relevant themes.
It’s a meditation on the loneliness we surround ourselves with, the compromises we make to keep what relationships we have, the healing nature of the passage of time. I learnt much about the machinery of Empire in its waning days. Yet, somehow, it is not a sad book. A minor miracle of a novel.
First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review).
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion…
I love music. And so I loved this more than any non-fiction book I’ve read in a long time.
Somehow it is the entire history of British pop music in a single book, from the first charts in 1952 until their death as a meaningful barometer of cultural taste in the early Noughties, breathtakingly audacious in scope, brisk yet comprehensive, and endlessly thought provoking.
A rallying cry for everyone who believes pop music is an art form (but, no, Bob, Sweet were not more important than Led Zeppelin). A book I couldn’t wait to return to every time I put it down.
A monumental work of musical history, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! traces the story of pop music through songs, bands, musical scenes, and styles from Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock around the Clock" (1954) to Beyonce's first megahit, "Crazy in Love" (2003). Bob Stanley-himself a musician, music critic, and fan-teases out the connections and tensions that animated the pop charts for decades, and ranges across the birth of rock, soul, R&B, punk, hip hop, indie, house, techno, and more. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a vital guide to the rich soundtrack of the second half of the twentieth century and a book…
I’m one of those scientists who sees little use for the philosophy of science.
At its best it describes the process or difficulties of doing science after the fact; but that description is not causal – nothing comes from knowing it. Streven’s book changed my mind.
He argues forcefully, in everyday, accessible language, for a model of how science works and what that means for how to do science. It’s changed how I understand my own work. I’ve even quoted from it in public. Brilliant.
* Why is science so powerful? * Why did it take so long-two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics-for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe?
In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument.
Like such classic works as Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of…
We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions. Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide.In The Spike, Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction. In vivid language, Humphries tells the story of what happens in our brain, what we know about spikes, and what we still have left to understand about them.
Drawing on decades of research in neuroscience, Humphries explores how spikes are born, how they are transmitted, and how they lead us to action.
