Book review: The Story Of The Human Body, by Daniel Lieberman

The Story Of The Human Body
Daniel Lieberman
(Penguin)
★★★★★

This book was published in October. It  has taken me several weeks to complete. This could be for two reasons.

Book reviews: Feral, by George Monbiot; The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith

BOOKS

Feral
George Monbiot
(Penguin)
★★★★✩

"Shifting baseline syndrome" is a curse of the re-wilding movement, one of a list of foes that also includes sheep, Scottish landowners and stupid EU diktats.

Book review: The Farm, by Tom Rob Smith

The Farm
Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)
★★★★✩

Tom Rob Smith's contribution to the Scandi noir canon is born of authenticity. His mother was Swedish although not, one presumes, the model for Tilde who turns up on his son's London doorstep one day with a story straight from the dark heart of that troll-ridden country.

Books: David And Goliath, Difficult Men, Two Girls, One On Each Knee

David And Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits And The Art Of Battling Giants
Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩

David and Goliath. Great story. That David. Beat the odds. didn't he. with his sling and stuff against the big bruiser Goliath. Every loser wins, as TV's Nick Berry once said.

That's not how it was.

Doink! You what?

5 reasons book translations are rubbish

Translated books are, on the whole, duff. I am currently engaged in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and it is only the story that persuades me to continue.

5 reasons translated books are rubbish…

Book review: Doughnut / The Hiding Place

COMEDY
Doughnut
Tom Holt (Orbit)
★★✩✩✩

Tom Holt is better than this. He is the master of the comic conceit played out with outrageous daring and with memorable characters.

His comedy is one of awkward predicaments, but in a plot that involves clumsy scientist Theo getting lost in the multiverse with literally an infinite number of escape routes then the comedy of restriction is somewhat lost.

It is as though that, offered such riches, he loses his discipline and focus. He writes wildly, never looking back, and in the end characters end up flinging vast slabs of emergency exposition to explain a lazy plot hole that we hadn't spotted because the story is lacking traction.

The bones of the plot are this: Theo Bernstein loses his job after destroying the Very Very Large Hadron Collider.

When his mentor Pieter van Goyen leaves him the contents of a safety deposit box in his will, Theo's life takes a turn for the better - or worse.

He finds the key to the multiverse and travels to worlds where anything is possible but given infinite power his needs are limited and his problems grow exponentially.

Neat idea lost in space.

CRIME
The Hiding Place
David Bell (Michael Joseph)
★★★✩✩

The disappearance of Justin Manning 25 years ago rocked an American small town.

His sister has been haunted by the boy's murder for years, especially now the man jailed for the crime has been paroled. A detective is also beginning to suspect something's not right.

David Bell is an authentic voice packing his novel with detail and tension. This is a fine read. The only failing is that this is territory that has been covered many times before.

Book review: On The Map, Simon Garfield

BOOK
On The Map
Simon Garfield (Profile)
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Simon Garfield surveys the historic landscape of map-making and concludes that they say as much about our story as they do about topography.

REVIEW
Like just about everything else in what was formerly modern life, the internet has both destroyed and re-shaped the landscape of maps.

Now, as Simon Garfield writes in this comprehensive, often overwhelming, survey of the craft of the cartographers, we do not pore over a map and look for the arrow saying "You Are Here".

Instead the map comes to us - via our phones, our SatNav and our flapping print-outs from Google. The GPS in our pockets puts us at the centre of the universe.

We are creating a new map, with fluid borders, made up of the connections we make via Facebook, Twitter and the like.

No longer, he laments, the childlike wonder of the Ordnance Survey in plastic sheathing on a wet day in Kendal, or an X Marks The Spot treasure map, or the unexpected wrong turn into a sleepy village (unless, of course, the SatNav is having an off day).

The author wanders far and wide in his quest for stories (presumably he knows where he's going) and takes in such mouth-watering themes as thieves, forgers, scandals and controversies, from the sale of the Mappa Mundi to the paradigm-shifting Vinland map whose importance and authenticity has been disputed for decades.

In early years, he points out, cartographers hated the white space of terra incognita and went to work on cartouches and a flights of fancy about the lifestyle of the inhabitants.
Occasionally a fake mountain range would appear and would stay for decades because cartographers copied each other.

But as the brave or foolhardy pushed back the boundaries - culminating in the golden age of Antarctic exploration - the globe was completed.

Meanwhile, form and function became the next big thing with the Tube map at its pinnacle.

Simon Garfield has an eye for the curious and quirky facts - such as the crushing news that Here Be Dragons is a fiction and how the A-Z lost all its Ts out the window - and this a joyfully plotted journey from Ptolemy to Googleplex.

One complaint: the reproduction of the maps is dour and disappointing.

Book review: Science book round-up

Stephen Hawking: His Life And Work
by Kitty Ferguson
Bantam Press
4/5

When Stephen Hawking became Luciasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge he was conveniently associated with his predecessor in the post - the irascible and unlikable genius Isaac Newton.

But, as Kitty Ferguson's biography of the time-wrangler makes clear, the lineage follows more comfortably from Albert Einstein who, in addition to his insight and genius, was an instinctive populariser.

The pair both have an approachable other-worldly image, self-deprecation and a way with wit that ensured they sidestepped the brickbats (or indifference) that is the usual fate of intellectuals.

Hawking's image is also his struggle. His disease has slowly eroded his body but kept his mind brilliantly alive.

That his computer voice is, paradoxically, our only route to his humanity means this 70th birthday tribute is an essential unveiling of the man and his motives.

Survivors by Richard Fortey
HarperPress
4/5

If Santa Claus were a scientist, he would be Richard Fortey, the veteran chronicler of the natural world.

Not only are his books gifts that keep on yielding sparkling treasures but they are delivered with such avuncularity that the brutality of extinction feels like a cuddle by the fireside.

His latest work is endlessly fascinating. Survivors sees the naturalist travel the world in search of animals and plants that have found a means to thrive, virtually unchanged, for millions of years.

As he points out, to suggest that these old-timers - ferns, horse shoe crabs, worms - are crude anachronisms is to miss the point. They carry secrets of reinvention that are far superior to those of the sprightly ingenues who claim mastery of the modern biosphere.