Tag Archives: books

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the authors responsible for turning me into a science fiction fan. During the early 1970s, I read Childhood’s End and the incomparable Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous with Rama and one or two collected works. The enjoyment of those books not only led to more of …

About a third of the way through this book, I was still thinking: I just don’t get it. What I didn’t get is the praise for the book and the fact it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I must still admit that I sometimes think I just don’t …

It’s a tough job to write a guide to regional beers, but thankfully Mark McKenna’s ten years in the Caribbean gave him the opportunity to sample all 75 local brands. His experience is chronicled in his new book, McKenna’s Guide to Caribbean Beers: All the Islands, All the Brews published …

I've found the perfect travel book, a collection of Ursula Le Guin short stories tied together by a delightful conceit ...

This morning while I was getting ready for work, I heard a brief news report on NPR about a wildfire on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Immediately I listened closer to catch any references to locations I may know, and was rewarded with a mention of the city of …

Early Australian history is usually told as a male-dominated story, and it is remarkable how often this is a story of male failure – Burke and Wills et al. The women who do appear are usually painted in lurid colours as prostitutes and slatterns, or as the odd lonely, isolated …

We watched What the Bleep do we Know this weekend and the most fascinating part of the movie (I have to admit that while I attempted to understand what they were saying, I only grasped the most obvious stated observations of quantum physics) was the segment when the Protagonist, brilliantly …

In the second volume of the memoirs of Jill Ker Conway, first female president of Smith College, she has just arrived in America. She starts off being perhaps unsurprisingly gushy about Harvard, after Fifties Sydney: “Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively …

Many people have quite heated positions on the subject of the new European Constitution but to my way of thinking, it’s such a simple no-brainer that at times it’s hard to remember what all the fuss is about. The proposed reforms will strengthen my rights as a citizen of the …

As a callow 16 year old virgin, forced by circumstances beyond my control to take premature control of my life, I had many romantic ideas about the world. Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game completely revolutionized the way I saw the world, showed me the limitations of fixed beliefs and …