Suitable Gift Book

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200 word stories. 40,000 words. Mixed genre. Age 12 to 120. $9.


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Soil and Sense- Michael Graham

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    My copy is from the 4 th impression of the original Faber and Faber book printed by the Western Printing Services Limited, Bristol. The book was considered important enough to be first printed in 1941, when invasion of England by Hitler’s armies appeared imminent. We already had the 4 th impression by 1944, so the book was in regular demand. Its relevance at the time was extreme, as it could only help the farmers struggling against national food shortages that were threatening to bring the British nation to its knees.     The book is very general, but mostly geared to the encouragement of lea farming, as the best way of optimising fertility on many farms. The preface to the book was written by the great agriculturalist E.J. Russell, from Rothamstead Experimental Station in May 1940. Soil and Sense was deemed to be of significant war time value, though it was the Great War, (WWI), to which the written words mostly related.     The book still ha...
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Sequela- Cleland Smith

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I am finding it hard not to be over complementary. Smith has a sure-footed competence as a writer that has helped her put together a very original and highly entertaining book. This near future science fiction cleverly links the progress of science, the general `progressiveness' of social norms, at least in Britain and a quite plausible future `gated' City of London, into a page turning read. The version I read had a few silly editing errors, but a word of concern to the author has led to the knowledge that these are being dealt with. The timeline on the story, set in 2080, seems feasible. This is important because at first the hedonistic world she portrays seems to be a vast distance from where norms of social behaviour are today. There are always extreme deviants, individual cases, but those deviant behaviours rarely and only slowly become mainstream. But sometimes they do, and especially when as in this book they are centred on a particularly powerful subset of peopl...
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Brief Answers to the Big Questions- Stephen Hawking

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     This is a great read, despite some minor repetitions. We have to bear in mind that this is really only a series of essays, some of which cover a little of the same ground. My view is that if Hawking had lived a little longer then this would have been a better compiled set of ‘letters on the big questions’, but that doesn’t much detract from the quality of the work, and certainly not from its messages. These essays run a lot wider than science, into Hawking’s hopes and fears for humankind. Some of the essays run into sensitive issues, which raise a good deal of honest debate. Well, there are just too many of us on our wonderful planet, which we are rapidly destroying, and this alone must justify our questioning of everything, even the very existence of God.      There are a few contradictions in the science, which isn’t surprising when writing about an incredibly quickly advancing field of science, cosmology, and especially when the material was...
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