Creator: Adam Hart-Davis
Publication date: 1999-05-20
Dewey code: 363.72840942109034
Price: £19.99
Review The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis / Sutton Publishing Ltd:Stephen Halliday describes the writing of this book as "a labour of love", but it would take a strong stomach to love some of the material he includes about the 19th- century Thames. Two million people poured their sewage directly into the river, "more filth was continuously adding to it," noted a contemporary, "until the Thames became absolutely pestilential". In the 1850s the river was black, and in the hot summer of 1858 the stink was so unbearable that the Houses of Parliament were driven from the chamber. But a hero emerges from this smelly mess, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer of prodigious energy and foresight, who "turned the Thames from the filthiest to the cleanest metropolitan river in the world, which it remains. " Halliday is indeed a little in love with his subject, Bazalgette, but it is easy to see why. The construction of the system of sanitation on which London still relies an enormous undertaking, but Bazalgette saw it through with tenacity and a kind of engineering genius. He saved more lives (by freeing the city from cholera) than any single Victorian public official. This book is a small marvel, elegantly written, generously illustrated and a fascinating insight into the guts of London. -Adam Roberts.
Authors
- Kevin Hawkes
- Kathryn Lasky
Dewey code: 520.92
RRP: £9.63
Price: £5.46
Review The Librarian Who Measured the Earth / Little Brown and Company:
Publication date: 2006-10-10
Dewey code: 500
RRP: £8.00
Price: £3.68
Review Descartes' Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe / Broadway Books:
Publication date: 2005-02-11
Dewey code: 617.48092
RRP: £19.99
Price: £7.99
Review The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness / John Wiley & Sons:
Edition: 3rd
Publication date: 1977-01
Dewey code: 575.008
Price: £3.50
Review Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays / Harvard University Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-07-01
Dewey code: 956.7044248092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £2.51
Review Vipers in the Storm: Diary of a Gulf War Fighter Pilot ("Aviation Week" Book) / McGraw-Hill Professional:
Authors
- Eric And Viveca Novak Saar
- Erik Saar
- Viveca Novak
Dewey code: 355.34320973
RRP: £13.36
Price: £3.08
Review Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo / Penguin Press:
Authors
- Tom Stafford
- Michael Cassutt
Dewey code: 629.450092
RRP: £12.95
Price: £5.02
Review We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race / Smithsonian Books:
Publication date: 1999-06
Dewey code: 530
RRP: £11.99
Price: £6.47
Review Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm / Perseus Books,U.S.:
Publication date: 1999-09-02
Price: £12.99
Review The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla - Forgotten Genius of Electricity / Headline Book Publishing:The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century argues, legitimately, that Nikola Tesla was the most important of the inventors who made modern life possible, simply because his insistence on making alternating current the standard made electrical equipment so much more versatile than would have been the case had Edison won. "Sparking and crackling round his darkened laboratory, making lamps glow from his pointing finger, (Tesla) must have presented an awesome spectacle, must have looked like a modern god of lightning. The effects of Edison's claim about the deadly risks of AC electricity were being disproved in a most spectacular fashion. " The tragedy was that Tesla was so self-destructively naive in his dealings with other scientists, with money-men and with the state. Typically, he had his money stolen on the way to the US, but managed to get aboard his liner by explaining what had happened and proving his identity; then nearly starved because he had no money for food and was too proud to ask for help. Lomas is excellent on this self-destructive streak-Tesla constantly alienated the powerful while putting himself in their power and talked as if the Nobel Prize, unlikely ever to be given to "a mere engineer", was in his grasp. Lomas takes us through the technicalities of the famous inventions and makes what case can be made for the crankier things-the electric laxative, broadcast power and various death rays; ironically Tesla's disdain for theory meant he never read the Einstein paper on which lasers would eventually be based. -Roz Kaveney.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-11-15
Dewey code: 109
RRP: £16.95
Price: £7.00
Review Francis Bacon (Princeton Paperbacks) / Princeton University Press:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2001-01
Dewey code: 338.470053092
RRP: £7.50
Price: £1.00
Review The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story / Penguin Books:Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerised yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?"Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do start-ups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman", as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist. " After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-footmast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer-from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge-"you didn't interact with him", Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"-but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humour of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever. Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than. 05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn 10 million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different. [+]person. " There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s-The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. -Ron Hogan,Amazon. com.
Creator: C. Weiner
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 1995-10-31
Dewey code: 530.092
RRP: £20.50
Price: £20.50
Review Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) / Stanford University Press:
Publication date: 1999-04-01
RRP: £12.99
Price: £12.99
Review The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession / William Heinemann Ltd:Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors. The Orchid Thief centres on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others: I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. [+]It's like I can't just have something-I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it. Even Orlean-so leery of orchid fever that she immediately gives away any plant that's pressed upon her by the growers in Laroche's circle-develops a desire to see a ghost orchid blooming and makes several ultimately unsuccessful treks into the Fakahatchee. Filled with Palm Beach socialites, Native Americans, English peers, smugglers and naturalists as improbably colourful as the tropical blossoms that inspire them, this is a lyrical, funny, addictively entertaining read. - Barrie Trinkle, Amazon. com.
Publication date: 2002-01-01
Dewey code: 624.092
Price: £35.00
Review Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel / Hambledon Continuum:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2005-08-25
Dewey code: 530.092
RRP: £20.00
Price: £7.99
Review Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein / OUP Oxford:
Edition: New e.
Publication date: 1993-08-27
Dewey code: 575.0092
Price: £9.15
Review The Autobiography of Charles Darwin / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Creator: Helen D. Millgate
Publication date: 1998-10-22
Dewey code: 940.548141
RRP: £19.99
Price: £11.49
Review Mr.Brown's War: A Diary of the Second World War (Pocket Biographies) / Sutton Publishing Ltd:
Creator: A.S. Weber
Publication date: 1999-01-01
Dewey code: 509.034
RRP: £19.99
Price: £19.99
Review Nineteenth-Century Science: An Anthology / Broadview Press Ltd ,Canada:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2000-09
Dewey code: 520.92
RRP: £3.88
Price: £1.02
Review Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei / Sunburst:
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Models & Brands:
The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, Descartes' Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays, Vipers in the Storm: Diary of a Gulf War Fighter Pilot ("Aviation Week" Book), Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo, We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla - Forgotten Genius of Electricity, Francis Bacon (Princeton Paperbacks), The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Stanford Nuclear Age Series), The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Mr.Brown's War: A Diary of the Second World War (Pocket Biographies), Nineteenth-Century Science: An Anthology, Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei |
