Volume 1. If you hate: loft living; bar-clubs; Tony Blair; chick lit; global warming sceptics; Keane; loyalty cards; IKEA; Kabbalah; bling and Richard Curtis...then you need IS IT JUST ME OR IS EVERYTHING SHIT? - an encylopedic attack on modern culture and the standard reference work for everyone who believes everything is shit. Which it is.
Volume 2 Bigger, badder, sharper, ruder, funnier, bestier ...this all-new companion volume to the 2005 Christmas bestseller IS IT JUST ME OR IS EVERYTHING SHIT? perfectly complements the first book to form the standard reference work on the shittiness of modern life - like a part-work, only good. .
Bestselling author Bryson sets out to put his irrepressible stamp on all things under the sun. This is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on.
From Library Journal Student of philology in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together with Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars [...]
This unique, one-stop, A-to-Z resource is packed with more than 1,800 entries that cover everything from nuts-and-bolts math to the most arcane unsolved theorems, from profiles of notable mathematicians to intriguing puzzles, challenging games, and even math humor.
The Universal Book of Mathematics is fully cross-referenced and brimming with all of the history, science, and numerical magic you need to make sense of everything from nothing to an infinite number of infinities. Whether you’re an amateur mathematician, a recreational math buff, or a dedicated student of numbers, this is the helpful resource, the entertaining pastime you’ve been waiting for.
