Publication date: 2006-10-02
RRP: £12.72
Price: £5.65
Review John Peel Remembered (Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-09-23
RRP: £16.63
Price: £9.51
Review Smiley's People / Hodder & Stoughton:
Publication date: 2008-11-27
RRP: £12.72
Price: £7.17
Review A Taste for Death (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Kerry Shale
Publication date: 2003-03-03
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £15.99
Price: £5.99
Review Life of Pi / HarperCollins Audio:Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that's the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat. According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada. All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction. -Sean Thomas.
Creator: James Macpherson
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2008-09-17
RRP: £24.47
Price: £14.69
Review Doors Open / Orion:
Creator: Greg McGarry
Publication date: 2004-11-30
RRP: £7.99
Price: £5.23
Review Story Box / Dancing Leaf:
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2001-11-01
Dewey code: 440
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.93
Review Instant Recall French Vocabulary: Learn and Remember French Faster than You Ever Imagined Possible! / McGraw-Hill Contemporary:
Publication date: 2000-10-19
Dewey code: 791
RRP: £14.67
Price: £7.93
Review An Evening with Johnners / Hodder & Stoughton:
Publication date: 2008-03-03
RRP: £12.72
Price: £8.99
Review Alistair Cooke: The Essential Letters from America: The 1960s / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Authors
- Larry Stephens
- Eric Sykes
- Spike Milligan
Publication date: 1995-10-02
Dewey code: 817
RRP: £12.72
Price: £7.22
Review The Goon Show Classics: He's Fallen in the Water! (Previously Volume 11) (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2003-05-05
RRP: £12.72
Price: £7.15
Review Have His Carcase: BBC Radio 4 Full Cast Dramatisation (Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-11-13
RRP: £14.67
Price: £7.33
Review Golf: The Cure for the Grumpy Old Man - It's Never Too Late / Hodder & Stoughton:
Publication date: 2008-10-09
RRP: £24.47
Price: £14.54
Review Talking Heads (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:Alan Bennett's award-winning series of six television monologues, Talking Heads, may have been first aired in 1988, but over a decade later it is still impossible to read these deeply moving and affectionate scripts without hearing the voices of the actors who played them. Maggie Smith as the alcoholic vicar's wife finding a semblance of happiness in an affair with an Indian shop owner, Patricia Routledge as the poisonous neighbour, Julie Walters as the over-the-hill dolly bird auditioning for a porn film and of course Thora Hird as Doris, the old lady alone in her home having fallen and broken her hip. All great performances and all made possible by Bennett's wonderfully observant and poignant scripts. Bennett rightly notes in his introduction to the pieces that, maybe apart from Doris, his narrators are artless in that they "don't quite know what they are saying and are telling a story to the meaning of which they are not entirely privy". But through their artlessnes they reveal more about Britain today and the stresses and strains placed upon ordinary people, than any number of docu-soaps that now claim to show us real life. -Nick Wroe.
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2002-03-01
Dewey code: 615.8512
RRP: £14.00
Price: £14.00
Review Self-Hypnosis / MacMillan Audio:
Publication date: 2008-02-04
RRP: £15.65
Price: £10.13
Review Giles Wemmbley-Hogg: Goes Off: Series 2 (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2006-12-14
RRP: £17.61
Price: £10.00
Review Blink / Hachette Audio:: For Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling The Tipping Point explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell's major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls `thin-slicing'. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. Much of this is utterly mysterious but some of the most astonishing and useful examples of thin-slicing can be learned. Gladwell hopes to convince us that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled so instead of merely praising the mysterious process of instinct and intuition he is interested in those moments when our instincts betray us, the situations where our powers of rapid cognition can go awry, where we fail to read the signs. Most disturbing of all is the degree to which culturally determined preconceptions and prejudices control us. Without reducing matters to racism and sexism Gladwell shows us that there are facts about people's appearance—their size or shape or color or sex—that can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations which explains why utter mediocrities (such as U. S. [+]President Warren Harding) can sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility; or why tall people earn substantially more than their shorter colleagues; or why car salesmen unconsciously charge prices according to race and gender. Gladwell's conversational prose style is concise, informative, accessible and entertaining. The stories, scientific findings and psychological tests are consistently surprising whether he is dealing with speed-dating, record promotions, police shoot-outs, the human face, or the reasons doctors get sued. -Larry Brown END.
Creator: Nicola Bayley
Publication date: 2006-10-02
RRP: £7.99
Price: £7.58
Review The Mousehole Cat (Book & CD) / Walker Books Ltd:
Creator: Richard Armitage
Publication date: 2006-11-06
RRP: £9.77
Price: £4.23
Review Robin Hood, Will You Tolerate This?: Episode 1 / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2000-11-30
Dewey code: 398.2452
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.15
Review Aesop's Fables (Junior Classics) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Miranda Richardson
Publication date: 2007-09-01
RRP: £48.93
Price: £29.70
Review An Earful of Horrid Henry / Orion:
| Browse Audio CDs:
Models & Brands:
John Peel Remembered (Radio Collection), Smiley's People, A Taste for Death (BBC Audio), Life of Pi, Doors Open, Story Box, Instant Recall French Vocabulary: Learn and Remember French Faster than You Ever Imagined Possible!, An Evening with Johnners, Alistair Cooke: The Essential Letters from America: The 1960s, The Goon Show Classics: He's Fallen in the Water! (Previously Volume 11) (BBC Radio Collection), Have His Carcase: BBC Radio 4 Full Cast Dramatisation (Radio Collection), Golf: The Cure for the Grumpy Old Man - It's Never Too Late, Talking Heads (BBC Audio), Self-Hypnosis, Giles Wemmbley-Hogg: Goes Off: Series 2 (BBC Audio), Blink, The Mousehole Cat (Book & CD), Robin Hood, Will You Tolerate This?: Episode 1, Aesop's Fables (Junior Classics), An Earful of Horrid Henry |
