30 Science


74358 A BRIEF HISTORY OF POISONS: From Hemlock to Botox and the Killer Bean


Calabar by Peter Macinnis Our fact filled book recounts the stories of celebrated poisoners in history and literature, from Nero to Thomas Wainewright, and from the death of Socrates to Hamlet and Peter Pan. Have you ever wondered about the sources of cyanide, strychnine, Botox, ricin


and sarin gas? Where do they come from and how could you detect something that can kill you in a matter of seconds? Here are their uses in medicine, cosmetics, war and terrorism in a rich miscellany. 239pp, paperback with line art. £8.99 NOW £4


71626 CORRUPTED SCIENCE: Fraud, Ideology


and Politics in Science by John Grant Even some of the greats - Newton, Galileo, Hooke, Dalton, Jenner - are now known to have fiddled their results or stolen others’ work in order to prove their theories. Some fraudsters, such as the still-unknown man who planted the “remains” of Piltdown Man for Charles Dawson to find in 1912, may have actually done science a service. There have been atrocities committed by the “scientists” who worked for Hitler and Stalin in the 20th century and more recently shameful and damaging attempts by the Bush administration to suppress climate change research. 336pp, b/w illus. £9.99 NOW £3


71627 BOGUS SCIENCE: Or, Some People


Really Believe These Things by John Grant People have believed (and, in some cases, still do) in perpetual motion, Bigfoot, Atlantis, extra-terrestrials walking amongst us, pyramidology, anti-gravity rays, mermaids, werewolves and all manner of unlikeliness. With delightful asides and deft skewering, Grant debunks the nonsense and shows how easy it can be to twist science to nefarious ends. 304pp, illus. £9.99 NOW £2.50


71805 FROM 0 TO INFINITY IN 26


CENTURIES: The Extraordinary Story of Maths by Chris Waring


Maths really took off in Classical Greece, and the names of Euclid, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes are still honoured today. Beginning with Charles Babbage and his protégée (and daughter of Lord Byron) Ada Lovelace and their Difference and Analytical Engines, the first electronic calculators and computers and on into the digital age and ending with some delightful mathematical conundrums and the language and the future of maths. 192pp, diagrams. £9.99 NOW £3.50


73195 BIG QUESTIONS: Maths by Tony Crilly


Ranging from the first known numbers, through people’s perception of statistics as ‘damn lies’ to the puzzle of whether we can create an unbreakable code, it tackles the 20 key questions that lie at the heart of maths and our understanding of the world. If you have ever wondered whether butterflies’ wings really cause hurricanes, if maths can predict the future, or why three dimensions are not enough, then you will be intrigued by the answers here although, be warned, they are not all cut and dried. 208 pages, elasticised bookmark, illus. £9.99 NOW £3.50


72285 ARMAGEDDON SCIENCE: The Science


of Mass Destruction by Brian Clegg Science will always involve an element of physical danger and Marie Curie herself died as a result of working with radium. In 2008 an application was made to the European Court of Human Rights to block the use of the Large Hadron Collider on the grounds that its potential power was too great to risk. The author examines the element of sheer status attached to nations in the “nuclear club” and discusses earthquakes, the information highway, nanotechnology and chemical weaponry. 294pp. £18.99 NOW £3


72301 RED MOON RISING by Matthew Brzezinski


At the height of the Cold War on 4th October 1957, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, Earth’s first ever artificial moon. Sputnik transformed science fiction into reality, passing over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes and propelling the USSR from backward totalitarian state to cutting-edge superpower and pioneer of the Space Age. The US, desperate to catch up, trails the Soviets in the space race the following year, with a controversial space programme masterminded by former Nazi rocket scientists. The full story and its colourful characters. 322pp, photos. $17 NOW £3


72507 X-EVENTS: The Collapse of Everything by John Casti


Technologically dependent, globally interconnected, the modern industrialised world is a complex system that is as unstable as a pack of cards. When an X-event strikes - and scientists strongly believe it will - finance, communication, defence and travel will stop dead in their tracks. The flow of food, electricity, medicine and clean water will be disrupted. Just imagine if an electromagnetic pulse were to destroy all electronics, if there were a global pandemic, if the world oil supplies dried up. 326 arresting pages. £17.99 NOW £4.50


72762 EVERYBODY’S BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE: A Giant Compendium of Yesteryear’s Facts edited by Charles Ray


The nuggets of knowledge and intriguing illustrations herein were originally to be found in a two-volume 1930s encyclopaedia called Everybody’s Enquire Within and they still have the power to hold us spellbound. We now know what a singing mouse is, when it rains in the Sahara Desert and whether ice can burst bombs. 320 pages, over 1,000 photos and diagrams, 8 colour gatefolds.


£19.99 NOW £4


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73550 EUREKA MAN: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes


by Alan Hirschfeld


The ancient Greek Archimedes was an inventor, engineer and mathematician and one of the greatest scientists of all time, and we know a surprising amount about his work. The Roman author Cicero refers to his famous Cattle Puzzle,


rediscovered in manuscript by the 18th century philosopher Gotthold Lessing, and the author gives the modern reader an intricately worked out solution to this classic mathematical conundrum. Many of Archimedes’ treatises and letters were lost in the sack of Syracuse in 212 B.C., when Archimedes himself was murdered by the invading Romans. Among them was the document known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, revealing Archimedes’ working methods. 242pp, diagrams. £20 NOW £5


73114 HOUSE OF WISDOM: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us


the Renaissance by Jim al-Khalili The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West, but here the award-winning British-Iraqi physicist unveils that legacy by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab and Persian innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance. He tells the story of how rulers of the Islamic empire funded armies of scholars who gathered Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts and translated them into Arabic, the language of the Koran. Then, from the 9th to the 14th centuries, scholars throughout the empire built upon those foundations a scientific revolution that would, centuries later, give rise to a similar movement in Europe. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science were actually the result of the ingenuity of these medieval scholars of the East. They solved the mysteries of the solar system, blood circulation, mathematics, optics and gravity long before the Europeans did. The most significant legacy of Arabic science was its evidence-based approach, and the father of this scientific method was an Iraqi physicist. But why did the Islamic world enter its own Dark Age after such a dazzling Enlightenment? A book you will not want to put down. 302 pages with figures, colour plates, note on Names Pronunciations Spellings and Dates, note on the Term ‘Arabic Science’, maps, endnotes, glossary of scientists and timeline. $29.95 NOW £8


73150 THINKING IN NUMBERS by Daniel Tammet


A book to change the way you think about maths and in Tammet’s mind, literature, art and maths are united. He imagines a young Shakespeare’s first arithmetic lesson in the zero, a new idea in 16th century schools, or the calendar created for a Sultan by the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam. Here are essays inspired by the snows of Quebec, sheep counting in Iceland and the debates of Ancient Greece to the pure possibilities advocated by Ricardo Nemirovsky and Francesca Ferrara. 229pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4


73632 AFTER THE ICE: Life, Death and


Politics in the New Arctic by Alun Anderson According to the author, what we are about to see is the fastest and biggest man-made change to planet Earth - ever. A 6,000,000 square mile dome of pure, white winter ice, 65 times the area of Britain, will soon melt away each summer, creating a new and unknown sea. Meanwhile, disputes rage as to who controls the region. Oil, gas and mineral companies are searching for the new Arctic’s wealth, while its older indigenous people continue their long fight for control of their circumpolar lands. The top predator, the polar bear, will most likely vanish, to be replaced by the killer whale. 298 pages, maps. £20 NOW £5


73784 LIFE OF PEE by Sally Magnusson Urine looms large in our lives, though we usually prefer not to mention it. Urine has proved effective in putting out fires, for instance in the remote province of Sichuan in 2007, and in earlier times it had commercial uses, being a key component of woad for ancient Britons and of stained glass in the medieval period. In 1917 the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp exhibited his notorious urinal under the title “Fountain”, though it was inexplicably junked after the exhibition and had to be reconstituted in 1964. 208pp, decorations. £10.99 NOW £3


71932 MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen


Not just about the history of the Industrial Revolution and the steam engine, but also an account of how inventors first came to own and profit from their ideas, and how the act of invention itself springs forth from logic and imagination. The most famous engine of all, of course, was the Rocket. From the inventor Heron of Alexandria in AD 60 to James Watt in the early 19th century, whose ‘separate condenser’ was central to the development of steam power, here are characters like John Locke with his vision of ‘intellectual property’ and Edward Coke and his patents. 370 paperback pages, illus.


£14.99 NOW £3.50 72347 DEEP FUTURE: The Next 100,000


Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager Professor Curt Stager has decided to take us well beyond what politicians consider “long-term climate change” - i.e. a few decades - and into what the next 100 millennia may hold. He predicts scenarios such as the ice-free, acidified Arctic being squabbled over as humans abandon the uninhabitable tropics and disappearing land, followed by their descendants retreating south again centuries later, as the seas refreeze. Later still, humans will be forced to burn whatever remains of our fossil fuels to survive a new Ice Age. 300pp. £20 NOW £3.50


SPORT


No, of course I haven’t been betting on horses Sybil dear. That’s just another little avenue of pleasure you’ve closed off.


- Basil Fawlty


74915 CHRIS BRASHER: The Man Who Made the London


Marathon by John Bryant For most people, to excel at one thing is ambition enough, but the distinction of the life of Chris Brasher (1928-2003) is the sheer number of his achievements, a man who quite literally made history. It was he who paced Roger Bannister for the first two laps of the legendary first four-minute mile at


Iffley Road Stadium in Oxford on 6 May 1954. He went on to win gold in the 3,000m steeplechase at the Melbourne Olympics of 1956, and was responsible for establishing the sport of orienteering and fell-running in Britain. In the 1980s he presented the Brasher Boot, his revolutionary and long-researched lightweight, waterproof hiking boot to a great many sports footwear manufacturers, all of who turned him down, so he went ahead and made it himself, becoming a millionaire in the process, all the while becoming one of Britain’s best- loved sports journalists and a pretty canny racehorse owner as well. But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the founding of the London Marathon, one of the biggest sporting events in the world, first run on 29 March 1981 and today competed annually by almost 40,000 runners around the capital’s streets and most famous landmarks. Full of some the greatest names in 20th century athletics, politics, business and sport, 310pp, colour and b/w photos. £20 NOW £5


74804 SQUEEZING THE ORANGE: Life’s Great Adventure - And The Cricket


Too! by Henry Blofeld Henry Blofeld is one of cricket’s many larger-than-life characters, famed for enlivening his commentaries on the world in general with an occasional glance at the pitch to see how the Test Match is getting on. Making no secret of his upper class connections, Blofeld


tells the story of his life in a series of episodes, starting with the love of cricket he developed at Sunningdale prep school, Eton and Cambridge. He had a spell in the City before going into sports journalism, and meanwhile he met and married his first wife Joanna. Their honeymoon in Jamaica included a visit to Goldeneye to see Ian Fleming, who had been at school with Blofeld’s father and paid him the compliment of naming one of his most sinister villains after him, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Thunderball. By 1962 Blofeld was covering county Cricket for The Times with an occasional piece for The Observer, joining his Cambridge contemporary Ted Dexter, now England’s captain. 1964 saw his first Indian Test, memorable not only for the cricket - Blofeld nearly had to play when Mickey Stewart went off ill - but also for the birth of his daughter back home. Luckily Blofeld had managed to get registered as an alcoholic, the only way of getting a drink in prohibition India. South Africa and Australian Tests also yielded memorable moments, for instance the batting partnerships of Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards in 1970 and Imran Khan and Wasim Akram in 1990. 360pp, colour photos. £20 NOW £7


74634 NEVER A


GENTLEMAN’S GAME by Malcolm Knox


The highly respected, award- winning writer of this revealing book was Chief Cricket Correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and certainly knows his stuff. He takes readers back to an era when, so cricket lovers nostalgically imagine, the Test Match - played each year between


England and Australia - was a matter of gentlemanly competition and camaraderie, with any disputes being settled over a glass of port. But, as this often shocking volume discloses, the truth was vastly different. In the early years, the game was fraught with often violent Australian-English rivalry, match- fixing, gambling, cheating and bitter politics. This was cricket in the raw - a time when players risked everything, and settled their differences with fists and feuds. Packed with colourful characters such as W. G. Grace, Fred Spofforth and Victor Trumper, the book brings to life the crusades against ‘chucking’, the short and often tragic lives of many of the early Test cricketers, the riots on the field, the fisticuffs behind the scenes and the lust for money on all sides. An eye-opener. 442 pages with list of tests. £20 NOW £7


74340 FOR RICHER, FOR POORER: Confessions of a Player by Victoria Coren


The daughter of the brilliant Alan Coren, Victoria has inherited her father’s trademark wit and quick thinking and is now a popular TV personality, thanks to this very English, funny and moving memoir. Miserable at an elegant day school for girls, Victoria finds an escape in the mysterious world of poker. 20 years later, she has won a million dollars and forgotten to have children. What price adventure? Here is the true story of happiness and heartbreak, smoke and mirrors, a memoir of friendship and belonging and it is full of the weirdness of England. 346pp, paperback. £8.99 NOW £3


74063 THE PLAYERS: 250 Men, Women and Animals


Who Created Modern Sport by Tim Harris


A must for every sports enthusiast or trivia collector, this fascinating book has 250 alphabetical chapters on people and animals who in the author’s view shaped the modern sporting scene. In the twenties Suzanne Lenglen was not only tennis’s first great female star but


the first woman star in any sport who achieved world- wide recognition. Pele was the first soccer star of the TV age, while Joe Davis developed a new style of snooker playing that led ultimately to the game’s popularity as a small-screen sport. Ben Johnson is perhaps the fastest sprinter in history, and Enzo Ferrari transformed the Grand Prix first as a driver and then as an entrepreneur with the Ferrari marque. Other greats on the roll include Sir Alf Ramsey, Lester Piggott, Fred Perry, Max Mosley and Michael Davis, poetically described as the Leonardo da Vinci of rowing. 628pp, photos in colour. £20 NOW £7


74317 LIVERPOOL MISCELLANY by Leo Moynihan


Ian Rush in his foreword shares his fascination with facts and figures, memories and characters like Bob Paisley, Kenny Dalglish and Alan Hansen, memorable matches and unforgettable goals. You’ll Never Walk Alone with these red legends - Waddle, John Barnes, the Hickson controversy, great gaffers like Roy Evans, quotable quotes, fact files, a peep inside the boot room, matches of the day, signing fees, international results, the Liverbird, the logo and the league records since 1892-93 season up to 2011-12 season. 166pp with line art. £9.99 NOW £4.50


74103 PELE 10: What Makes a Great Player from the Master


by Pele Arantes do Nascimento


No. 10, the most iconic position in football, the shirt that every player wants to wear, worn by the superstars that fans idolise. In his own book, the greatest ever exponent of the No. 10’s art, Pelé, celebrates the most famous fellow practitioners through the decades, maestros like Cruyff, Maradona, Zidane and Puskás, unstoppable attackers such as Charlton, Gullit, Zico and Klinsmann, dashing forwards like Henry, Baggio, Garrincha and Rivaldo who captivated with their play. Plus lethal goal scorers such as Eusébio, Müller, Lineker and Greaves, and the less celebrated number 10s who have shone briefly but made a dramatic impact like Hurst, Rossi, Milla and Kempes. Colour. 208pp, 10" square. £18.99 NOW £3


74187 THE LAST CHAMPION: The Life of


Fred Perry by Jon Henderson One of Hendo’s Sporting Heroes, the name of Fred Perry is still emblazoned on sporting leisurewear today. Wimbledon champion three times in the 1930s, Fred Perry was the finest tennis player Britain has ever produced - until Andy Murray. Less well known is that Perry came from an unprivileged background and found himself an outsider in the sport that looked down on the achievement of the under-classes. Perry discarded his hallowed amateur status in 1936 and turned professional. He compounded this perceived sin by taking out US citizenship when the Second World War broke out. He embraced his new country wholeheartedly from Hollywood to Florida, leading a scandalous private life in the beds of numerous Hollywood starlets. 294pp, paperback, photos. £8.99 NOW £3


74188 THE LIMIT by Michael Cannell 10th September 1961, at the boomerang-shaped racetrack at Monza, in northern Italy, half a dozen teams are preparing for the Italian Grand Prix. Phil Hill, the first American to break into the top ranks of European racing, and his Ferrari team mate Count Wolfgang von Trips, a German nobleman with a movie star manner, face one another in a race that will decide the winner of Formula One Drivers’ Championship. By the day’s end, one man will clinch that prize. The other will perish face down on the tracks. Here are their gruelling experiences in such deadly roads as the Mille Miglia and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Classical music loving Hill was a pathological worrier who vomited before races. Both men strove to attain the perfect balance of speed and control that drivers call ‘The Limit’. Here is an atmospheric recreation of a lost world of seductive glamour and ever-present danger. 318 very large pages, illus. £14.99 NOW £5


72239 FIRSTS, LASTS AND ONLYS: Cricket by Paul Donnelley


!


A treasure trove of oddities and rare gems such as the first streaker at a Test match in England, the first batsman under 20 to score a Test 100, the first bowler to take four consecutive wickets in Australia, the first knighthood for services to any sport, the last England match overseas as MCC, the only Test match decided on the last delivery, the only Englishman to score a century against Australia in England on their debut, and the only father and son to score centuries in the same First Class innings among them. Over 300 brilliant and bizarre curiosities. 224pp. £9.99 NOW £4.75


72454 GOLF MEMORABILIA by Kevin McGimpsey


When it comes to golfing collectables you could not be in better hands than those of Kevin McGimpsey who has been the golf specialist for Bonham’s the auctioneers for ten years. As with all sporting collectables, unless the item is staggeringly rare, its condition is paramount. Books and programs must be mint, ceramics crack-free and artworks signed and dated. The book is divided into ten chapters covering all aspects from balls, tees and clubs to badges, autographs, art, trophies and golfing ephemera, and discusses hundreds and hundreds of items, most of them illus. in colour. Anecdotes and golfing lore are thrown in. 208pp, 8"×10". £25 NOW £4


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