Decline of the English Murder

Billed as some of Orwell’s “less accessible” material, Decline of the English Murder and other essays contains ten texts on a strange variety of subjects, but in which his potent insights into the flaws of man and society remain constant – as well as a biting wit.

In Cold Blood

Fiction or non-fiction?

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Non-fiction or fiction?

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. Non-fiction…

Wonderful Life

For anyone in the dark, the Burgess Shale is one of the greatest fossil discoveries in palaeontological history. Uncovered in British Columbia by Charles Doolittle Walcott, one of America’s most distinguished scientific minds, the Burgess Shale contained an astonishing diversity of forms – but most significantly, from a time at which no solid evidence for life had yet been found.

God Is Not Great

I came to Christopher Hitchens’ famously irreligious book quite late, having already read similarly themed work by Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Harris (The End of Faith; Letter to a Christian Nation) and Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker; I’ve not read The God Delusion, but I’ll probably get around to it one day). The argument being made, more or less, in these books is that there is no place in the modern world where dogmatic belief systems are more beneficial than humanism and rationalism, and that in many cases they do active harm more often than good.

The End of Faith

When a reviewer describes Sam Harris’s debut as “pugilistic”, he’s probably thinking about statements like this:

“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

Edited by Richard Dawkins, this collection of extracts was created with a specific goal: to showcase examples of “good writing by professional scientists, not excursions into science by professional writers” – and only from within the last century. Dawkins chose to limit his own involvement to the introductory prefaces to each extract, but in these he warmly introduces many figures who the interested layperson, like myself, may never have heard of, and succeeds in making crystal clear his admiration even for those with whom he may not agree professionally.

Letter to a Christian Nation

He addresses You, directly and personally, and although he doesn’t know your name he does know what you think. Written in response to a deluge of pro-biblical retortions to his previous book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation is very short and pointedly sharp – A Challenge to the Faith of America.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It is hard to believe that something so utterly horrific could result in something as beautiful as this small memoir. Once an editor of the style magazine Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby was in the prime of his life when a devastating stroke put him in a twenty-day coma, from which he “recovered” to find himself trapped within his own body, having no more control over it than to blink one eyelid. With only this (and the painstaking attention of Claude Mendibil, a freelance editor to whom the book is jointly dedicated) at his disposal, Bauby endeavored to communicate his thoughts and feelings with an eloquence now physically denied him; these are the butterflies within his diving bell.