A refreshingly brief and jargon-free overview of attachment theory and the consequences of adverse early experience. The clinical example was good though it would have been better if it had been annotated, rather than leaving it to the reader to connect it to the text. Indeed, a few more such clinical examples would have made this more useful and rather better value.

Kindle gripes: The book uses its own font, which I found quite hard on the eyes. The few formatting errors are relatively unintrusive but the diagrams are too small and remain fuzzy when zoomed. The table of contents links to chapter headings only (four chapters), while the index is useless as it has no page numbers.

This slender book may appeal to teenagers with attention deficit disorder but references to it as `popular science' in various reviews will convince only the most credulous. It is the kind of thing Richard Dawkins attacked in Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder as the `debauchery' of science, and there is precious little science on display. It's also very short and written in a self-consciously populist `nudge-nudge, wink-wink' style that grates by the end of the first page. That the substance is offered as links to other people's work on the internet seems ethically questionable; it certainly short-changes those who paid the £11.99 retail rather than the 99p Kindle `Daily Deal'.

This begins well enough, with some interesting background on the Starship. However it soon becomes clear that this isn't 77 pages about the Starship, and it isn't really a book at all. There is the inevitable sloppy Kindle formatting, particularly of tables and some of the photographs, but large passages of the text repeat verbatim in several places (so at 77p it's not even a penny a page). Most jarringly, the Starship focus soon peters out and instead we get chapters about the Rutans, Scaled Composites, Voyager, Spaceship One, Beechcraft and The Bell X projects!

At the end of the day this appears to be a hastily-compiled collection of articles or passages written for other purposes, loosely related to the Beech Starship and compiled by a Starship owner. The standard of writing is competent so perhaps these were written for publication in magazines or elsewhere. It's interesting enough but very short and in need of a good editor. Perhaps most importantly it is misrepresented as a book about the Beech Starship, which really doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Well now, I sent two of these devices back first time, but encouraged by a suggestion from someone who commented I decided to try again. Sure enough, if you use a stop-lock type of connector (Hozelock calls them 'aquastop') it doesn't work and all you get is a pathetic dribble. I have yet to understand why this is, but when I replaced the aquastop connector on my hose with a normal one it worked as advertised!

I can't comment on how the Scarecrow stands up over time as I just have it working today, but I have to say the spray head looks very fragile and apart from a couple of springs is made of very cheap plastic mouldings. I wonder how it will survive prolonged UV exposure, as in my experience plastics become brittle and crack. However, it looks like you can probably use a normal reciprocating spray head designed for watering lawns, available relatively cheaply at garden centres and online suppliers.

I have left my original review intact below as a diagnostic aid for others, particularly as Contech's second-rate technical support did not help me with my specific questions about this. Instead they chose to send a (clearly-inappropriate) canned response. Full marks to Amazon's 'comment' feature for once!

(Original review follws)

The detector seems to work and triggers the device, but the 'spray' head doesn't spray. All I get is a limp three or four-foot stream of water in whichever direction the head happens to be facing. Occasionally there might be a little wiggle, as if the head wants to actually create a spray, but mostly nothing. It looks like the water jet is too wide and the pressure inadequate to provide motive power to operate the spray head. It's not a one-off because I bought two and neither works. I even bought a pressure tester, which reports my mains pressure as 60psi, or well within the range suggested by the manual (30-80psi).

First things first, this isn't a book but a blog that's been 'Kindled'. That said, it avoids the pretensions of many such 'ebooks' and even manages to be quite funny at times. It's very short and doesn't have much structure, but that's mainly because there isn't enough material for a whole book. In fact, given the author's story I wouldn't be surprised if this was put together as a book proposal to pitch to publishers. As others have said, the cartoons are hard (and occasionally impossible) to read on a Kindle.

This isn't about writing, it's about Chuck Wendig, who isn't nearly as a cool as he thinks he is. It may be that there's some practical value to be gleaned from these lists of writing tips but the author's self-indulgent style makes getting to it hard work. Wendig's writing is abrasive, patronising, gratuitously profane and devoid of wit. I don't know if `author intrusion' is on one of his lists (I didn't make it to the end), but there's a certain irony in a book about writing that so relentlessly fails to engage the reader. On the other hand it only costs 77p, so if you're on a budget (or you're amused by rude words) you may find something you need.

The overwhelming impression this book leaves you with is that William Gibson hasn't written much non-fiction. It's a slender volume that purports to stretch to 250 pages but that, in fact, contains only 158 pages of text once you edit out the four blank pages separating each of the 25 pieces featured. I assume this is Gibson's entire non-fiction output, given the somewhat rag-tag nature of the reviews, forewords, essays and talks assembled here. Much of the content is dated and some of it repeats or re-interprets material covered in other pieces. All of it is terse, but it's also recognisably Gibson in style and in its discovery of novel perspectives on the mundane. Each piece is followed by a very brief commentary which, along with the introduction, appear to be Gibson's sole original contributions to the book.

A light-weight affair that costs far too much and is probably of most interest to Gibson completists.

I'm no literary critic, but the structure of this book appears so self-consciously contrived that it might easily be the result of a writing assignment. This alone wouldn't necessarily damn the product, but in my view it quickly loses its way and fizzles out. I really liked the first sixty pages, which are written in a simple and yet lyrical style that conveys an increasing pace as the children grow up and approach adulthood. But then it's as if a different author takes over. The rest of the book is an accelerating catalogue of the three friends' increasingly divergent adult lives, and it is written in a style that barely resembles those early chapters. The significances of plot seem heavy-handed to the end (when they become downright crass) and from here on the book is, honestly, quite dull. I'd like to think that in skim-reading the latter two-thirds at an increasingly-impatient rate I was somehow connecting with the author's message, but it's hardly a recommendation.

Tim Minchin is a brilliant pianist, a good singer and a great satirist. But he's a solo artist, and this show didn't do it for me. The new material didn't excite, except perhaps for the wickedly subtle 'Pope Song', while the orchestra served mainly to obscure Tim's fantastic piano playing. The show-stopper, of course, was 'White Wine in the Sun' - played solo. Some things are better left alone.

I have a theory about books on quantum physics, which is that their capacity to engage the lay reader is inversely proportional to the number of the page he or she is currently reading. This book contributes to my ad hoc evidence base, though it does a creditable job and will likely merit a second and third reading before I can claim to have truly 'collapsed its wave function'. It's essentially a primer on the grand themes of quantum physics - but with dogs. The author's pet plays the 'dog on the Clapham omnibus', listening to his didactic outline of each such theme and then posing the questions we might ask if we were there. It's basically a good idea and the 'dog' theme provides material for contrasting everyday objects with things on a quantum scale, but it's also unquestionably corny at times. The main problem, though, is that the dog invariably fails to ask all the other questions that inevitably arise when the finer points of some terribly subtle experiment aren't explained clearly enough. In this, it's rather like those lists of frequently-asked questions (FAQs) that never seem to feature the questions we would actually want to ask. All that said, it's a contemporary introduction to the science and about as accessible as we have any right to expect of a book that confronts humankind's most esoteric body of theory. It also scores bonus points for including a chapter on the misappropriation of quantum physics by New Agers and quacks.

Regarding the Kindle edition, this has got to be the worst example of proofing I have yet to experience. There are, as you would expect, quite a lot of numbers, algebraic formulas and diagrams, and in a book such as this the consistent failure of attention to such details is of consequence that is simply unacceptable to a paying customer. The representation of exponents is occasionally correct but often not, in which case we read, for example, '1036' instead of 10 raised to the 36th power, or '10-21 seconds' instead of 1 divided by 10 to the 21st power. There are frequent occurrences of two particular idiosyncrasies, the substitution in text of the word 'indent' for 'left' and the substitution in formulas of '|' for '<'. The former, which is no doubt some markup artifact of an automated conversion of the text, results in such initially baffling passages as 'sometimes she wags her tail farther to the right, sometimes farther to the indent'. The latter, again likely some markup meta-confusion, gives us such unintelligible formulae as 'a|V> + b|H>', where presumably the more straightforward 'a<V> + b<H>' is intended. Algebra aside, given that this book relies so heavily on dialogue it shows a woeful inconsistency in its formatting, such that it's occasionally difficult to tell whether it's the author or the dog who is speaking. The message is clear - buy the paperback*, not the Kindle download.

(*Having visited my local WHS and checked out the paperback, I notice that the '|' v '<' issue appears in all the same places, so either the formatting is correct or the paperback is wrong too. The 'indent' and other problems are indeed Kindle-specific.)