RogerBW's Blog

The Sea Rover's Practice, Benerson Little 24 June 2022

2005 non-fiction. Using mostly primary sources, the author attempts to determine just what pirates, privateers, and other ne'er-do-wells of the sea got up to in the Golden Age of Piracy.

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Forty Years of Murder, Keith Simpson 20 June 2022

1978 autobiography. Keith Simpson was one of the successors of Spilsbury, and one of the first people in England to turn forensic pathology from an act of drama into a science.

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Evidence for the Crown, Molly Lefebure 30 May 2022

1954 non-fiction. Molly Lefebure was a junior reporter who took a job as secretary to Keith Simpson, the Supervisor of Medico-Legal Post-Mortems and the forensic pathologist most often consulted by the Metropolitan Police. Reissued in 1990 as Murder on the Home Front.

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The Laundrymen, Jeffrey Robinson 23 April 2022

1995 non-fiction, an informal look at money-laundering.

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The Golden Thread, Kassia St Clair 28 August 2021

2018 non-fiction. Kassia St Clair, a design journalist, looks at the history of fabric and how it has influenced, and been influenced by, the history of civilisation.

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Backroom Boys, Francis Spufford 23 August 2021 - 4 comments

2003 non-fiction, a study of six British post-war technological projects.

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The Long Way Home, Ed Dover 20 June 2021 - 5 comments

1998 non-fiction. A Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper was en route from Noumea to Auckland when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. They were instructed to make their way back to the USA as best they could.

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Red Thread, Charlotte Higgins 29 May 2021 - 4 comments

2018 non-fiction, Charlotte Higgins explores the maze and labyrinth in fiction and their influence on the world.

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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon 07 February 2021

1991 non-fiction. Simon spent 1988 looking over the shoulders of the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Division and writing articles about them for the Baltimore Sun.

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Nerves of Steel, Tammie Jo Shults 24 January 2021 - 4 comments

2019 non-fiction. On 17 April 2018, the Boeing 737-7H4 registered N772SW suffered a catastrophic engine failure at 32,000 feet over Pennsylvania. Only one person died. This is the story of the captain's life.

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The Science of Being Human, Marty Jopson 20 January 2021

2019 non-fiction, popular science; short treatments of scientific aspects of human existence.

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling 12 January 2021 - 2 comments

2020 non-fiction. In 2004, Libertarians started moving to Grafton, New Hampshire, in an effort to "free the town". The bears soon followed.

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Libra Shrugged, David Gerard 06 November 2020 - 2 comments

2020 non-fiction. In 2019, Facebook announced that it was planning to revolutionise money. How did it fail?

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Shady Characters, Keith Houston 05 October 2020

2013 non-fiction; Houston looks into the history and evolution of a variety of punctuation marks.

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Maid, Stephanie Land 03 October 2020

2019 non-fiction, Stephanie Land's description of raising a child without a partner while working as a cleaner.

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War Doctor, David Nott 25 July 2020 - 2 comments

2019 non-fiction. Nott is a general and vascular surgeon who uses his leave to volunteer with MSF in combat and disaster zones.

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L.E.L., Lucasta Miller 24 June 2020

2019 non-fiction, examining the life and work of Letitia Landon.

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The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes 22 June 2020

2008 non-fiction, an informal history of English science in the age of Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphry Davy.

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Hello World, Hannah Fry 04 April 2020

2018 non-fiction, a layperson's introduction to the way in which algorithms are allowed to affect life. (Another Book of the Week condensation.)

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Bolder, Carl Honoré 29 February 2020

2019 non-fiction. Honoré looks at the practicalities and possibilities of ageing.

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West with the Night, Beryl Markham 27 February 2020

1942 autobiography of the first person to fly the Atlantic solo non-stop from east to west.

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On the Clock, Emily Guendelsberger 16 February 2020

Guendelsberger worked as a reporter at a local newspaper; it was closed down. Through a combination of poverty and journalistic curiosity, she took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon warehouse ("fulfillment center"), then later worked at a call centre and in a fast-food outlet.

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Trainwreck, Sady Doyle 12 February 2020

2016 non-fiction. Doyle examines the history and the anatomy of the celebrity trainwreck, the (female) figure who is deemed to have fallen from grace and behaved badly.

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The Moon, Oliver Morton 06 February 2020

2019 non-fiction. Morton considers the history of human interaction with the Moon.

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Underland, Robert Macfarlane 20 January 2020

2019 non-fiction. Macfarlane explores natural and man-made underground spaces.

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War Doctor, David Nott 22 December 2019 - 1 comment

2019 non-fiction. Nott is a general and vascular surgeon who uses his leave to volunteer with MSF in combat and disaster zones.

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How To, Randall Munroe 10 December 2019

The author of the webcomic xkcd gives desperately impractical but scientifically rigorous advice on how to solve common problems.

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Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus, Fiona MacCarthy 08 December 2019

2019 non-fiction, examining the life and work of Gropius.

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Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter 29 November 2019

2019 non-fiction. A history of sewing and embroidery, trying to recover the stories of the people who did it.

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Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, Michael Caine 15 November 2019 - 1 comment

2018 non-fiction, Michael Caine's (third) autobiography, shading into advice for aspiring actors.

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Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande 18 October 2019 - 1 comment

1934 non-fiction, a short look at the writing mindset and how to set oneself to work.

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In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, Lindsey Hilsum 17 October 2019

2012 non-fiction, following the life and death of Marie Colvin.

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Erebus: The Story of a Ship, Michael Palin 10 October 2019 - 2 comments

2018 non-fiction. HMS Erebus had already travelled to the Ross Ice Shelf; in 1845, she was sent to search for the Northwest Passage, and never came back.

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Lying for Money, Dan Davies 02 May 2019 - 2 comments

2018 non-fiction, an informal look at the history, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of fraud.

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Poison Romance and Poison Mysteries, C. J. S. Thompson 08 March 2018 - 3 comments

1899 non-fiction; Dr Thompson, a medical historian, examines the history and practice of poisoning.

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Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, David Gerard 31 January 2018

2017 non-fiction. What is bitcoin, and why should any sensible person have absolutely nothing to do with it?

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The Science of Food, Marty Jopson 27 January 2018

2017 non-fiction, popular science; short treatments of scientific aspects of farming, food transport and cooking.

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Neoreaction a Basilisk, Philip Sandifer 16 January 2018 - 1 comment

2016 non-fiction. Sandifer writes about the alt-right, starting with the writings of three luminaries of neoreaction and in demolishing them wanders through a variety of strange places.

Note: this is the title both of the collection and of the first essay, which seems also to have been published separately.

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Soonish, Kelly and Zach Wienersmith 14 January 2018 - 1 comment

2017 non-fiction, popular science. A biologist and a cartoonist look at ten fields of technology that seem likely to produce large changes in human life.

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War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges 29 November 2017

2002 non-fiction: an experienced foreign reporter gives his views on the fundamental psychological brokenness of war.

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The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson 20 November 2017

2003 non-fiction; the story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and of Herman Mudgett or H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer.

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The Battle for History, John Keegan 12 November 2017

This short book is a survey of histories of the Second World War.

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The Rules of the Game, Andrew Gordon 08 November 2017 - 1 comment

For over a hundred years, the Royal Navy had been expecting to win the next Trafalgar. On 31 May 1916 off the Danish coast they got their chance, and it didn't go as well as might have been hoped.

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The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage 16 October 2017 - 2 comments

1998 non-fiction, an informal history of the age of the telegraph.

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Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein 20 January 2017

2011 non-fiction. Orenstein breaks down various elements of the pink-princess culture as marketed to young girls.

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Rivethead, Ben Hamper 30 November 2016 - 1 comment

1991 autobiography. Hamper writes about his life working on the GM factory floor in Flint, Michigan.

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Project Orion, George Dyson 24 November 2016

2002 non-fiction: George Dyson, son of Freeman, recounts what can be told of the history of Project Orion, a plan to propel spacecraft with nuclear explosions.

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Unsolved London Murders, The 1920s and 1930s, Jonathan Oates 05 October 2016 - 2 comments

2009 non-fiction. Oates recounts the twenty cases in London during these two decades which were treated as murder, but never solved.

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The Chemical History of a Candle, Michael Faraday 16 May 2016

1861 non-fiction, popular science, transcriptions of early Royal Institution Christmas Lectures; Faraday starts from the basics of combustion and goes on to the frontiers of nineteenth-century chemistry.

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The Science of Everyday Life, Marty Jopson 15 April 2016

2015 non-fiction, popular science; short pieces introduce the scientific explanations for commonplace oddities.

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Team Rodent, Carl Hiaasen 07 February 2016

1998, short pieces on the effects of Disney on Florida and other places.

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Kick Ass, Carl Hiaasen 19 December 2015

1999 collected newspaper columns, written from 1985 onwards. Hiaasen gets his teeth into issues of local politics, corruption, finance and wildlife preservation, often all at once.

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Falling Upwards, Richard Holmes 29 November 2015 - 1 comment

2013 non-fiction, an informal history of the rise and fall (sorry) of the man-carrying balloon.

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The Box, Marc Levinson 17 November 2015 - 4 comments

2008 non-fiction, an informal history of the shipping container. Until the Second World War, almost all non-bulk freight was breakbulk, loaded one piece at a time into a ship's hold. Fifty years later, pretty much everything long-distance was going in containers. How did the change come about?

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Fly Navy: The View from the Cockpit 1945-2000, Charles Manning 02 July 2015

2000 non-fiction, a collection of anecdotes by officers of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.

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Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Effects and Survivability, Charles S. Grace 31 May 2015 - 1 comment

1994 non-fiction, volume 10 of the Brassey's New Battlefield Weapons Systems and Technology series. A practical primer on the design and operation of nuclear weapons, their effects, and their simulation.

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Windscale 1957, Lorna Arnold 29 May 2015

1995 non-fiction. In October 1957, the core of Windscale's Pile 1 caught fire, burned for three days, and spread radioactive contamination across what was then Cumberland. This is the official history of the incident and its aftermath.

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A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman 05 March 2015 - 2 comments

1978, popular history. Tuchman recounts the history of France and some nearby countries in the latter part of the Fourteenth Century, with particular focus on the nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy.

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I Think You'll Find It's A Bit More Complicated Than That, Ben Goldacre 06 February 2015

2014; a collection of Ben Goldacre's short writing, mostly for the Guardian.

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In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent 29 November 2014 - 5 comments

2009: Okrent examines the history of invented languages, and in particular the rare instances that weren't immediately forgotten.

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Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre 18 November 2014

Ben Goldacre explains at length how pretty much everything about drug research and selection is rotten.

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What If?, Randall Munroe 03 November 2014

The author of the webcomic xkcd works out back-of-the-envelope answers to odd scientific questions.

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Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder 31 October 2014

This highly influential book on screenwriting lays out a standard structure to which all saleable scripts should conform.

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Chickenhawk, Robert Mason 25 October 2014 - 6 comments

Robert Mason flew Hueys for a year in Vietnam. This is his story.

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One Hundred Days, Admiral Sandy Woodward and Patrick Robinson 16 July 2014 - 2 comments

In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands; a Royal Navy task group was sent to take them back. This is the memoir of the task group's commander.

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I Was A Stranger, John Hackett 21 June 2014 - 2 comments

In September 1944, then-Brigadier John Hackett commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade during Operation Market Garden. He was wounded at Arnhem and captured, and spent several months hiding with members of the Dutch underground.

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Rebuilding the Royal Navy, D. K. Brown and George Moore 10 May 2014

In 1945, Britain had a large and often hastily-constructed fleet which was clearly close to obsolete, and very little money with which to update it. This is the story of what happened next.

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Fateful Choices, Ian Kershaw 15 March 2014

Kershaw examines ten choices made during the years 1940-1941 that, in his opinion, substantially affected the course of the Second World War.

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Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre 25 February 2014

This is the story of the well-known deception operation in the Second World War: dropping a dead fake courier into the sea near Spain, in the hope that his deceptive paperwork would be taken seriously by the Germans and misdirect them as to the location of Allied landings in the Mediterranean.

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