In the pulp magazines and comics of the 1950s, it was predicted that the future would be one of gleaming utopias, with flying cars, jetpacks, and robotic personal assistants. Obviously, things didn't turn out that way. But the world we do have is actually more fantastic than the most outlandish predictions of the science fiction of the mid-20th century.
***Stocked 8 Nov 2012***

20.5.10

An A-Z of Hellraisers is the last word on inebriated misbehaviour, and the miscreant mob in this whopper of a book constitute the most amazing grouping to see print, from Alexander the Great, whose drunken revelries once ended with the destruction of an entire city, to W. C. Fields, who passed critical judgement on a brass band by urinating over them from a hotel balcony, Dylan Thomas, who drove a sports car onto Charlie Chaplin's private tennis court, to Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, suffocating on his own vomit after consuming forty measures of vodka - what a night out that was!

28.7.11

This title reports from science's new frontlines. "An Iceberg as Big as Manhattan" is a gripping report on the new frontlines of science and the environment from the BBC's own correspondent, David Shukman. His skill is to get the big picture and to present it amid the everyday details of life and people.

Profoundly attracted to animals from childhood, Temple Grandin began early on to make links between the autistic and the animal views of the world. Farmers and breeders were baffled that she could come in and invariably pinpoint the cause of any aberrant or troublesome behaviour in their animals. Grandin, in turn, was baffled that they couldn’t spot the problems themselves — until she realized that they just weren’t visually oriented the way she and the animals were: and that meant really taking in ALL of the details of the scene. ‘Normal people’, as she consistently calls them, might use their more prominent frontal lobes to tidy experience into language and concepts, but miss a whole ‘register’ of visual data that didn’t fit their expectations.