At the time he wrote this in 1920, Karl Radek was a loyal Bolshevik. This short book, like Trotsky’s more famous Terrorism and Communism, was written in rebuttal to Karl Kautsky’s book of the same…
Even in 1956, when Ed McBain wrote this book, drug addiction was a problem in the United States. Like so many of the books in the 87th precinct series (this is the third), this story…
This is the second book in McBain’s legendary 87th Precinct series, set in a fictionalised (albeit recognisable) New York City. McBain was experimenting with the idea of a whole team as ‘hero’ of the series…
I began reading the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain nearly 40 years ago, having stumbled upon them entirely by accident in a library. McBain (real name Evan Hunter) is widely seen as the inventor…
This book is a cross between Jack Finney’s time travel classic Time and Again and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Written in 1979 and set three years earlier, it tells the story of a young African…
This is a very strange — and to me, sad — book. It was Morchiladze’s first novel, published in 1992, and describes the journey of two young men from Tbilisi to Armenia. As Georgia began…
British historian Dick Geary, who passed away last year, apologised several times in the course of this short book for not being able to go into any detail. That’s because the book was a part…
Most books I’ve seen about “life extension” and immortality are written by advocates of various ways of living much longer, or even forever. These include Ray Kurzweil, the noted tech guru, and Dave Asprey, the…
It’s said that when he died, Lenin left behind a library in which the largest number of books were written by himself — but the second largest group were books written by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky…
I read lots of books about health, obesity, diet and nutrition. I learn something from almost all of them. Even the most useless of them will contain one or two new insights, or sometimes ideas…