On a freezing November night Commissioner Alec Blume is called to the scene of a shooting.
The victim is Sofia Fontana, the sole witness to a previous killing. Blume’s enquiries lead from a professor with a passion for the art of memory to a hospitalised ex-terrorist whose injuries have left her mind innocently blank; from present day Rome’s criminal underclass, to a murderous train station bombing in central Italy several decades ago.
Against the advice of his bosses and his own better judgement, Blume is drawn ever deeper into the case, which looks set to derail his troubled relationship with Caterina...

The New York Times Book of Physics and Astronomy provides us with a selection of articles from the New York Times which covers the last decades of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twenty-first century. We begin with the discovery of x-rays, for which Roentgen received the first Nobel Prize in physics, and go through the most recent entry of July 4, 2012 on the discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC. There is even a book review of A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, published just last year. The articles are divided into sections generally covering such subjects as the nature of matter, applications of science, and cosmology.

The battle of Isandlwana was the single most destructive incident in the 150-year history of the British colonization of South Africa. In one bloody day more than 800 British troops, 500 of their allies, and at least 2,000 Zulus were killed in a staggering defeat for the British empire. The consequences of the battle echoed brutally across the following decades as Britain took ruthless revenge on the Zulu people.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction.

The Human Impact on the Natural Environment: Past, Present, and Future

The seventh edition of this classic student text explores the multitude of impacts that humans have had over time upon vegetation, animals, soils, water, landforms and the atmosphere. It also looks into the future and considers the ways in which climate changes and modifications in land cover may change the environment in coming decades. Extensively re-written, it contains many new statistical tables, figures, and references.