Archive for books
Old Man’s War: John Scalzi returns to a familiar sci-fi genre
John Scalzi’s science-fiction novel enters a competitive and distinguished field of sci-fi books that tell the story of someone enlisting in a future army to fight aliens. Between the military gung-ho enthusiasm of Starship Troopers and the Vietnam influenced cynicism of The Forever War, the field has been covered by some of the very best [...]
The Wonderful Future That Never Was: Gregory Benford’s sumptuous production
A sumptuously produced book (though the idea of having a dust cover which turns into a poster does not really work), Gregory Benford’s book is a collection of some of the best, worst and strangest predictions for future technology published over the years in the pages of the American magazine Popular Mechanics. A few wider themes come [...]
Flying Free: Nigel Farage’s take on his own life
Events and the political calendar are likely to keep UKIP as one of the most prominent ‘other’ political parties in the UK over the next few years, making this newly revised and expanded autobiography of its most high-profile and flamboyant personality, Nigel Farage, timely not only for the party’s own fans but for anyone else [...]
Engines of War: how wars were won and lost on the railways by Christian Wolmar
Both military history and the railways regularly generate large numbers of publications, with even the small details of minor events often covered in copious detail by numerous different authors. Strange then that the overlap of the two, the role of railways in military history, has generated little attention and no over-arching standard history. Christian Wolmar’s [...]
What our readers have been buying this year…
Lib Dem Voice has an affinity deal with Amazon, which means if you purchase goods from Amazon via our link, Lib Dem Voice earns a small commission. We don’t get to know about people’s individual orders, but Amazon does report overall sales and these show that the five best-sellers to our readers in 2011 were: [...]
Smersh: Stalin’s Secret Weapon – Vadim Birstein documents an untold part of Stalin’s horrors
Thanks to Ian Fleming and James Bond, SMERSH is one of the best known foreign intelligence agencies in the world, with its chilling acronym based on the Russian for ‘Death to Spies’. However, as this book starts out explaining, much of Fleming’s version of SMERSH is wrong. Not only has little accurate information been published [...]
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt
Rachel Hewitt’s entrancing story of the birth of Britain’s Ordnance Survey is both a skilful piece of history and also a striking example of the limitations of the profession. It was a dedicated group of people who led the way in mapping, and for all their dedication they were also curiously unfocused, often being distracted [...]
The race to fly to the North Pole
Had I not been sent a review copy of Show me a hero: The sin of Richard Byrd Junior by Jeremy Scott, I suspect I would never have read it – and what a treat I would have missed out on. From the cover and beautifully chosen typography – wonderfully invoking the 1920s – through [...]
Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor
The author, Steven Connor, is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, a post that signals the sort of book this is – long on literary theory and short on technical historical detail. It is not a more diverse version of, say, The Pencil: A history of design and circumstance but rather a [...]
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait: book review
K.A. Bedford’s science fiction time-travel murder mystery Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait was short-listed for the 2008 Philip K Dick award and the comparison with the master of dystopian, paranoid, time-twisted mystery plotting shows both the book’s strengths and its limitations. It is a good, enjoyable book – but not in the Philip K Dick class, which [...]
