Author: Hilary Spurling
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An Excellent Book, 2010-06-08
This is an excellent book, placing Pearl Buck squarely at the centre of the mid 20th Century growth in understanding of China. Pearl Buck experienced the poverty, endeavour and humanity of rural China and brought it to the attention of a suspicious and ill-informed America. A complex person herself, Buck used her skills and, latterly, her wealth to help those who had befriended, moulded, as well as physically threatened her during her early years.

Spurling has researched her subject exhaustively and draws her picture of Buck not only from the published and unpublished records of the time, but also from Buck's books, which are semi-autobiographical. This is a complex task, not least because Buck's own attitudes changed over the years.

The author also positions her subject and her family firmly in context and illustrates the evangelistic rigour of Buck's father, her first husband and much of the rest of the missionary community in China.

Pearl Buck was banned by the Communists once they assumed power. It is an interesting development that the current regime has begun to rehabilitate her. So Spurling's book tells us something about China today, as well as China a hundred years ago.

Author: Miles Kington
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A fantastic piece of writing, 2008-12-19
Loved this book, told in Miles' inimitable style. It is laugh out loud funny, but also deeply moving with some excellent humourous observations along the way. Buy it - you won't be disappointed.

Author: Mary Beard
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great book, 2010-07-05
Mary Beard's book is well written and comprehensive in its appraisal and analysis of the site of Pompeii and how the evidence we've been left with can be interpreted. If you have half an interest in ancient history or this incredible site i'd recommend this book. nick

Author: Tony Wolf, Suzanne Franks, Franks/Wolf
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Must have book!, 2010-03-16
This book is an absolute MUST for anyone with teenagers! I wish I had read it about a year ago. Not only do I have two teenagers of my own, but I also work with teenagers. This book could have been written specifically for me...the quotes and examples used made me think that the author had based it on events and comments in my home! Fabulous book!

Author: Chris Mullin
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surprisingly good, 2010-07-25
I admit I had not really heard of Chris Mullin, I was just vaguely aware that he is a Labour left winger. This book is a revelation.
Chris Mullin achieves little in a political sense, the book is quite long but totally absorbing. He writes with an engaging, unpredictable style, he has some great little stories scattered around the pages and some fascinating insights into Tony Blair "The Man", John Prescott, Gordon Brown -clearly thinks he is hopeless-, David Cameron - who he seems to rate, Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson etc.
Has been compared with Alan Clark's diaries, I think they are very comparable, equally good in their very different ways

Author: Christopher McDougall
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The bible for barefooters, 2010-07-23
This book is simply *the* bible for barefoot runners or those interested in the sport. It is excellently written and the story itself is inspirational. You will want to kick off your trainers by the end of the first few chapters! The book is easy to read, well researched and I know I'll be constantly looking back to it whenever I need a little more motivation on my own journey as a barefoot runner.

Author: David Harvey
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Spellbinding .. .. as good as any thriller., 2010-06-03
If you, like I, have found yourself pondering the banking crisis that befell the US and Europe at the close of 2008, agonised over the reasons and causes that led to the crisis, feel dispossession and indignation at the enormity and consequence of the bailouts, and wonder that the bailouts are indicative of counter-democratic tendencies, then David Harveys' 'Enigma of Capital' is a book for you; and if you have never contemplated any of the foregoing then David Harveys' 'Enigma of Capital' is also a book for you.
Prior to the events of 2008 and the succession of events that ensue within the Euro-zone I would never have considered reading such a title or such a topic, and I would have been scepitical that any one person could analyze the causes of a crisis, indeed a succession of crises, with such pragmatism and clarity. It is by chance and for unconnected reasons that in the new year of 2009 I began serious contemplation of other and more personal challenges and it was an entirely unexpected result that the direction I followed with regard to that would also yield unconventional insight in regard to economics, not from an aspect of a study of the flow of money, but from an aspect of evolutionary theory as applied to the long term functional evolution and expansion of economic activity. None of this makes me clever or knowledgeable but I do gain some satisfaction from having reasoned along one or two lines of thought and then subsequently finding similar assertions, and many, many more, put forward with aplomb and gravitas by Mr Harvey. 'The Enigma of Capital' is timely and revelatory in explaining not just the current, but a succession of market crises, and it resounds with me because a seemingly unlikely way of looking at things produced embryonic thoughts synergistic with (some of) the content.

David Harvey is a professor of anthropolgy with a detailed insight of Marx and Marxs' 'Capital'. Words like 'Marxism', 'Capitalism' and 'Communism' are loaded. Such loading precipitates pre-conceptions and such preconceptions would previously have been a barrier to my becoming interested, yet Harvey has fired curiosity in me, not for the political direction, but for potential to explain the how and why of the catastrophe.
Marx, I believe, was largely an essayist, reasoning out the evolutionary traits and likely consequences of growth and change within monetary economies and capitalist architectures much in the same vain that Darwin applied his insightful mind to the question of evolution. Marx, it is reported, had considerable interest in Darwins' work. It has taken decades for a clear endorsement and clarification of Evolutionary theory. Genetic science has now proven Darwin almost entirely correct in principle, albeit not entirely correct in the detail. For what I may know of Marx (very little) it may be that a succession of crises, especially the ripple effects of the banking crisis of 2008, and emerging analysis and comprehension could do for Marx what genetics did for Darwin, ie. prove him largely correct in principle. In appreciation of this Mr Harvey may have a head start over prevailing orthodoxy.
I agree with the two preceding reviewers, this is an immensely valuable analysis of the current financial and global monetary crisis that makes uncommon sense. I confess to be being a bit of a dullard, but I have found this volume to be both a compelling and readable explanation of a very challenging subject and it reads with the pace of a most skilfully crafted thriller. The suspense is in watching real-time events unfold as academics, advisers, governments and alliances try to face the ensuing challenges.

Author: John Kay
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Excellent, 2010-06-19
I bought this book for my son's birthday and he is delighted with it. He says "John Kay is one of the few economists who can write in English".

Author: Richard Wrangham
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Sizzling good read, 2010-05-30
'Catching Fire' is a well argued and almost conversationally presented thesis that is a highly readable account of the likely role of dietary evolution in the story of human evolution. The deceptively simple presentation may belie the extent of observation, insight, and interdisciplinary reading that underpins the postulations within. There is a very extensive bibliography. The thesis is highly speculative, and necessarily so for the archeological record is really very scant, but then Darwins' 'Origin' was equally speculative in the context of its' own time. Likewise the thesis may be highly contentious amongst academic peers. However, the book is not written for academic review, there are after all archeological and anthropological journals for that purpose, instead this is a highly informative and highly readable account that could ignite greater curiosity and interest in a lay reader.

The origin and evolution of the human diet is a specialised and minority area of research which almost totally escapes any interest amongst a wider public. This is lamentable for the topic illuminates a lot about the modern human condition.

Diet links a species to its' habitat. Habitats are not constant; change is driven by long term climatic variations. Feeding opportunities change with changing habitats; there is an imperative to adapt. Without a doubt, the transition from australopithicine to modern human involved physiological, mental and behavioural evolution that was driven by incremental and successional changes to the diet. Incremental 'improvements' in the diet over time resulted in a reinforcement cycle of improving physiological change including the emergence of an enlarging brain and mental capacity with new and improved dietary opportunities. The metrics that most promisingly illuminate the long process of dietary improvement are increased general caloric density within the diet and increased availability of certain essential fatty acids that may be the building blocks of an enlarging brain. While other authors more extensively discuss the wider aspects of dietary evolution than does Wrangham, Wrangham discusses the value of the ability to treat potential food sources with heat, how that releases innovative new foods as dietary possibilities - most notably calorically dense starchy tuberous ones, how heat treatment renders both starchy plant matter and meat protein more digestible, and the social ramifications that arise with the adoption of cooking with focus and the assertion that the ability to cook is a major ratchet point in an improving capacity to provision caloric and nutritional needs. The broad brush strokes in 'Catching Fire' make good sense even if the detail may be contended.

'Catching Fire' is both entertaining and informative and illuminates the how and why mastery of fire is so important to human evolution. Wrangham makes frequent comparisons to chimps. The distinction between chimps and humans is that chimps have not escaped the dominion that nature exerts over them. They are constrained by the limitations of their diet. Most of chimps and other apes waking hours are spent provisioning, masticating and digesting their food. The modern human is a species that escaped this constraint and that began to exert dominion over nature and such dominion over nature, at its expense, is increasingly becoming a cause for concern.
The modern global (monetary) economy is only possible because of a satisfactory 'digestive economy'. These are profundities that are left unexplored by Wrangham yet the work underpins such assertions. Cooking produces advantageous morphological change in food. Does not modern familiar industrial and economic development rely almost exclusively upon mastery over fire? Almost all modern technology is founded upon the conversion of fuel to motive power in a process involving combustion or from heat driven morphology. Humans are still catching fire.

Contrasts between evolutionary human diets and modern industrialized ones are receiving scrutiny for what they may have to reveal about possible causes for obesity and rising rates of chronic illness. Wrangham is clearly aware of this. In the his Epilogue Wrangham discusses modern obesity in the context of his cooking hypothesis. If the modern explosion of obesity and rise in chronic illness is attributable to denatured carbohydrates, the proliferation of availability and consumption of denatured oils and fats, and the proliferation of denatured sweeteners, then the inferences about the human desire for increasingly readily digestible food, historically having been afforded by the advent of cooking, but in modern society being increasingly afforded by the industrial processing of food, ought not to be overlooked. In short, humans may have taken the notion of pre-process or pre-digestion too far, beyond the limits of our physiological adaptation. The point clearly evident in the final pages of Wranghams work.

Catching Fire is a comprehensible and instructive work if considered in isolation. The nature of it being an easy read and short in length may diminish appreciation of its potential gravitas, but set in a wider context the value of 'Catching Fire' may be several orders of magnitude greater. I disagree with other reviewers who denude it for being summary and popularist. Skepticism and questioning are healthy but there is an extensive bibliography that could assist with a more detailed study for the inspired.

"Once you begin to see the world through food, everything changes. Seemingly unconnected things turn out to be closely linked; apparently confusing relationships spring into relief. Food is one of the greatest forces shaping the world." (Carolyn Steel; Hungry City, p308)
Carolyns' quote was placed in a different context in a work which discusses the role of food in shaping the urban environment, nonetheless it applies equally well to the context of this review. I could not agree more.

Author: Atul Gawande
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Paradigm Shifting!, 2010-07-06
It's true that you can learn so much about your field of expertise by taking a 'fresh eyes' approach - this book does just that. I'm not a surgeon. I would recommend this book to anyone involved with implementing change or organisational transformation. All too often in business simple solutions to known problems are dismissed as they are deemed to be 'insulting to our intelliginece' - yet this book offers a refreshing perspective. This provides a great analysis (in a simple-to-read-fashion) into the risks of relying on knowledge and expertise alone in todays knowledge-hungry world. It's difficult not to relate to the significance of this books' revelations - due to many examples coming from a field that we all have some level of experience of - hospitals - even as patients. I would especially recommend this book to anyone inlvolved in implementing 'Lean' who has an audience who is a little tired of hearing Toyota Toyota Toyota references......