Suitable Gift Book

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


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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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Remembering Love- Nadine Christian

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I feel I have to start with Pitcairn Island rather than the book. This island is one of four lumps of rock and/or coral sticking out of the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Only Pitcairn itself is inhabited, being one of the most isolated communities on Earth. The population of under a hundred is predominantly descended from the Mutineers of the Bounty and a few Tahitians, who voluntarily, or not, joined the group. In 1790 just nine individuals 6 men 11 women and a baby found the then deserted island and settled. Since that date the permanent population has never been greater than 240, and is now only a quarter of that number. In recent times the young have tended to leave, firstly for education and secondly for the benefits of the wider world. This problem is now shared by nearly all isolated communities. The life blood is constantly drained, and often faster than it can be transfused. So what has all this got to do with this fiction novel? Everything! Nadine Christian is the writer in...
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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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