Book Review

In this book, the author, Colin Beavan, describes his search for a sustainable lifestyle. His goal is to live as a No Impact Man, with his wife and baby daughter in New York City. Throughout the book, Beavan investigates not only sustainable solutions for an environmentally friendly lifestyle, but also questions as to whether our large impact on the planet actually makes our lives happier. Personally, I like the idea of an eco-friendly lifestyle, but at the same time I happily accept the plastic bags Tesco conveniently offers, and turn up the heating to warm my draughty single glazed room. A hypocrisy in which I am not alone: how many of us rather close our eyes to this global problem thinking we can’t make a difference anyway? The claim that Beavan would show me how “we can realistically live a more eco-effective and content life in an age of inconvenient truths” thus appealed to me. Read more »

With the TV show Dexter turning a serial killer into its main protagonist, and with real madmen all-too-frequently in the headlines, the question of who is and who isn't a psychopath may concern more people than just the occasional worriwart. In his book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson recounts his search for an answer; who are the pyschopaths?

Ronson describes his encounters with many extraordinary characters, including some that are possibly or definitely psychopaths. The central person of the narrative, however, is not a psychopath, but a psychologist by the name of Bob Hare. Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist, eponymous 'psychopath test' of the book title, a state of the art methos for diagnosing pyschopaths. Based on twenty personality traits, it uses characteristics such as a ‘grandiose sense of self-worth’ or a ‘lack of empathy’ to decide whether the person across from you is a psychopath. Read more »

Never Let Me Go brings a whole new meaning to 'organ donation'. Narrated by 31 year old Kathy as she looks back on her school days at Hailsham, author Kazuo Ishiguro explores a dark and distorted version of the modern world. The students at Hailsham are organ donors; cloned to provide spares until the day that they 'complete'.

This book highlights the social implications of human cloning, as it explores the students’ lack of understanding and realisation behind their being, as well as the public reactions to it: “Art students, that’s what she thought we were. Do you think she’d have talked to us like that if she’d known what we really were?” Read more »

In a world where we are continuously told about the increasing risk of any number of diseases such as diabetes and heart-disease, Mismatch: The Lifestyle Diseases Timebomb breaks down humans' evolutionary journey in an attempt to answer the question of how these lifestyle diseases have come about. This book is a veritable voyage through the evolution of humans and a large number of other species. Read more »

As a female scientist I have rarely considered myself one of ‘the weaker sex’, or imagined that the life ahead of me would be a battle against discrimination and oppression. Until now, that is. In Delusions of Gender, psychologist Cordelia Fine sets out to discover the truth about differences between men and women, at times painting a bleak picture of society’s attitude towards gender equality.

Descriptions of carefully constructed 21^st century studies are interspersed with amusing quotes from Victorian gentleman scholars, who were concerned about the fate of women’s ovaries should they be allowed the vote. We may have gone through the suffragette movement, and a wave of liberation and bra burning in the 1970s, but how much has society really moved on? Read more »