The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life — “One of Dawkins's best: a big, almost encyclopedic compendium bursting with information and ideas. Dawkins ... the consummate zoologist ... leads a grand tour of all surviving 'pilgrims' to a 'Canterbury' representing the very origin of life--and what a fantastic trip it is...The panorama is splendid but it's the details...that delight, and also exhibit some of Dawkins's best writing.”
Kirkus
“Dawkins's new book, which is fabulous in many more ways than one, is a picaresque account of evolution running in reverse as a series of wondrous tales of explanation.” John Cornwell, The Sunday Times “In The Ancestor’s Tale Dawkins traces back human ancestry 4bn years to the dawn of life on Earth. The result is one of the richest accounts of evolution ever written.
Despite the enormous capacity of the human brain, we only utilise on average two per cent of our potential brainpower. There is, therefore, the potential for each of us to considerably expand our brainpower.
Maximise Your Brainpower provides readers with a series of mental workouts covering areas of creative thinking, problem solving, memory, logical thought, mental agility and intelligence. Chapters are each designed to exercise a different kind of brain activity, with a series of newly compiled exercises, puzzles and tests.
My Word ~ (BBC Radioshow)
Here is a 3 CD collection of the British radio show; "My Word".
Performed before an appreciative audience,
My Word! the Radio series, had several segments; word origins, word meanings, word themes with teams earning two points for each correct answer. The series was created by Edward J Mason and Tony Shryane and performed by Frank Muir & Denis Norden. The most popular segment was the stories of the confused origins of popular phrases.
What If?s of American History (What If?) by Robert Cowley
An all-American collection of essays on the pivotal moments in our nation's history by award-winning historians, the third in the bestselling series. The 18 contributors to this latest installment of the What If? series are indeed eminent: they include David McCullough, Tom Fleming and Robert Dallek (though series editor Cowley might have found more than one woman for his roster). For historians whose works are bound by facts, there must have been pleasure in letting their imaginations engage instead in speculation, though the "shadow universe" presented here is still rooted in the historical record and reflects back on it. In "Might the Mayflower not have sailed?", for example, Theodore K. Rabb enumerates a series of "strokes of luck" that enabled the Pilgrims to come to America, including Sir Edwin Sandys's propitious takeover of the Virginia Company. And in "What if Watergate Was Still Just an Upscale Address?", Lawrence Malkin and John Stacks wonder what would have happened Nixon hadn't been forced to resign the presidency. Americans would be less cynical, they speculate, and, more surprisingly, the U.S. might have had a national health insurance plan. Other essays ask fascinating questions about the the Civil War and the Cuban missile crisis. A pleasure for history buffs longing to engage in some footloose imagination, this book drives home the fact that even momentous political events can hinge on a few uncontrollable events. Maps and b&w photos. The "what if" concept is one of the most original and engaging on the current history bookshelf. The essays are chock-full of provocative ideas; they are as accessible to the general reader as they are to the scholar; and they are the perfect gift for the dedicated history buff on anyone's list.
