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This book has all the cliches of prison books and films – the framed innocent, the beatings and sexual abuse, corruption and murder – but the most alarming is that this is based on true events over a 100 -year span at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys. Various reforms outlawed certain abuses, but corrupt regimes…

Naomi Wood is a very skilled writer – her prose flows like a river, beautiful sentences with wonderful word choices. Her words are lyrical, beats pulsing through the page, all playing in harmony to make the reading a joy. I suspect I’d get pleasure reading her to-do list. When I finished The Hiding Game, I…

This is an excellent book, explaining the tricks of the medical industries, how they can work around the regulator bodies, and how the journalists aren’t censoring their wild claims. There have been a few recent scandals, the MMR and MRSA, which are pulled apart here – showing how the only ‘scandal’ was how people who…

The oddly titled Byzantine World War mostly covers the rule of Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and his betrayal and untimely death at the hands of the Doukas family, which led to the demise of the Eastern Roman Empire. The book continues with a brief continuation into the Crusades, with the Fourth Crusade actually sacking Constantinople,…

Safi Bahcall was a recent guest on the Tim Ferriss podcast. He told interesting stories, like his first date with his wife-to-be, though she believed it to be a business meeting, and how he’d sit in a bar for hours studying a single page of a book to appreciate the use of language. He came…

This is an intelligent book – from the language, to the character observations and even the clever sub-title (it really is short stories sandwiched between two novellas!). Few people are able to form characters like Shriver, she catches their nuances, their foibles and their strengths, and this makes their behaviour and motivations all the more…

James Wallman’s Time and How to Spend It is a mixed bag. I found the first half a struggle – trying to overlay a book structure onto your holiday arrangements seems great in theory, but in reality no-one does, or would do, that. Plus, the anecdotes seem shoe-horned into places where they didn’t belong, with…

Summer Crossing is one of those books that aspiring writers bang out, then, when they re-read it, realise it’s tosh and cast it aside. All great writers have these novels – Stephen King has a few, even J. K. Rowling progressed two novels before abandoning them. Unfortunately for Truman Capote, several years after his death…

Because We Say So is a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays and speeches from the period roughly from 2011 to 2014. Individually, they’re interesting, considered criticisms of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. The problem is that collectively, they’re very repetitious – all discussing the same themes of how USA and Israel are the…

I haven’t read science fiction for a while. I used to love Clarke and Asimov as a teenager, chuckled at Douglas Adams then had a lull until I was gifted Dune a few years ago. Having just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Walking to Aldebaran, I can see myself looking for more sci-fi novels, and certainly more…