About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Gaia Vince
Positive Nature ... [a] hugely enjoyable sprint through human evolutionary history ... Many aspects of Transcendence have been explored before. And, with that wealth of palaeoanthropological and other research to draw from, most of the chapters become a mosaic of tersely introduced evidence. Read it anyway. It is at least 22 times more memorable than many textbooks, and a good story without — so far — a happy ending.
Oliver W Sacks
Rave The Guardian (UK) Sacks\'s stories are drawn from case histories, textbooks and sympathetically observed encounters with patients ... But the substance of the book soon turns on Sacks himself and the extraordinary impact on his own perception of the world once he discovers that he has ocular melanoma ... The Mind\'s Eye is an eye-opener. Sacks\'s patients recognise what is happening to them, and find ways to cope ... His stories deliver both clinical understanding and a serving of hope. The victories are small, but they are victories all the same. More profoundly, such stories remind us that our brains are all we have.
Oliver Morton
Rave The Economist ...[Morton] has written not just a very good book about the Moon but even more admirably, a different one. It is good because it is superbly well-written and enjoyably organised. It is different because it looks beyond Apollo towards the future: the Moonbase as a technological challenge, an economic gamble and as a testbed for the much more dangerous missions to Mars ... [Morton] brings an enviable knowledge of science-fiction literature to focus on the uneasy futures we imagine for this hostile homestead-to-be ... Finally he brings a reporter’s direct experience of encounters with tomorrow’s lunarnauts ... [a] mix of forthrightness and observation is part of what makes the book a pleasure to read.
Stephen Hawking
Positive The Guardian \"For those readers who invested in A Brief History and perhaps never quite finished it, there is good news: almost everything in Brief Answers is effortlessly instructive, absorbing, up to the minute and – where it matters – witty.\
Carlos Rovelli, Trans. by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell
Positive The Guardian Time is a commodity: ours to buy, spend, save, keep, mark or waste. Time has volition: it flies, drags, stands still. The verbs alone suggest that we have always understood time as subjective, something experienced according to individual circumstance ... In 1972, physicists sent a quartet of caesium clocks jetting around the planet in different directions to confirm Einstein’s special relativity. People who live at altitude really do have more time, as do people who stay still. The difference as measured on an atomic clock is counted only in billionths of a second, and we on Earth can conveniently ignore this temporal untidiness. But everything in the universe is in motion; everything feels gravity’s grasp. Time shifts with both mass and velocity, to be different at every point in the universe: we live, Rovelli says, in a \'spiderweb of time\'.
Sam Kean
Positive The Guardian This book starts with a blood-soaked toga and the conceit of Caesar’s last gasp, but it does truly have an epic story to tell, and Kean takes us at a canter right through the entire 4.5bn year saga ... Inevitably, some of it is familiar: who could talk about oxygen without invoking Joseph Priestley, or Lavoisier; nitrogen without mentioning Haber, or nitrous oxide without Davy? The numbers, too, are numbing ... The overarching story is instructive, told lightly and with pace. Kean thoughtfully packs even more digressions into his endnotes ... It’s a helluva read. And it’s a gas.
Ed Yong
Rave The Guardian ...[a] marvellous, thrilling and richly annotated book ... And it is a page-turner in a very old-fashioned sense. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed ... We have an inner life, in every sense, and are the richer for it: richer still for this witty and compelling book.