I tried to buy galoshes in the cold wet winter of 1978-9, but the department stores claimed they'd not stocked them for decades. Now, the power of the interweb means these invaluable items are available once a gain, than goodness. I cycle to work an need to protect my smart shoes from slush and flood. These slim overshoes mean I don't have to carry gumboots and change, and they are tidy enough not to be noticed.

Excellent value compared with others, and survives abuse like bathtub immersion without complaint. Bi enough for texting with human fingers!

The sheer range of characters Proulx conjures through her writing about overlapping times and spaces in the tumbleweed-strewn vastness of the US West is stupendous. Each story has an absolutely distinct tone, but the whole collage amounts to an impressive portrait of a place. Brokeback is only characteristic of the set in that it gets inside the emotions of individuals struggling to come to terms with a world of challenges and contradictions, and readers should expect the other stories to be utterly different in atmosphere, though equally vivid.

Proulx's characteristic writing style is not to everyone's taste, but it follows in an honorable line of american novels that break with the classic literary forms of English to recreate the sense of everyday speech and thought. Although to my "ears" Shipping News is not so successful in this regard as some of her Close Range short stories, it does generate a convincing wordscape around the lives of remote Newfoundlanders trying to recreate their lives after the collapse of both the local economy and the private lives of the protagonists. Very engaging and memorable.

All of the imaginative, chilling and psychological touches you might have imagined had been created by film-makers of this story turn out to be original to Bram Stoker's novel. A good, pacey, holiday read that has lost nothing of its freshness. It's almost "undead"!

This is a very big and dense book, and you'll need time and energy to get the most out of it, but it's well worth the effort. Don't believe the dismissive reviews by conservative romanticists and sectarian anthropologists; they've either not read it or are incapable of persuasion. In the first half, Pinker undertakes a monumental survey of the available evidence concerning the rates of violence (war, genocide, assault, murder, judicial killing, etc.) and exclusion (slavery, disenfranchisement, discrimination, etc.) from prehistory to the present, and across most parts of the globe. The tide of statistics tells a consistent, overwhelming and frankly uplifting story of progressive and accelerating improvement. As a tiny example, homicide rates in Europe have declined steadily by 100-fold over the last seven centuries, are continuing to decline rapidly, and are estimated to have been orders of magnitude higher in earlier millennia. World Wars, industrial genocide and regional famines notwithstanding, the trend that we are all likelier - much likelier - to live socially and economically engaged lives and die naturally in our beds than were each of the preceding generations. Clearly, as we individuals age, we tend to reminisce and view the present as a nastier world than the one we grew up in. But the data just as clearly show that this is a subjective error. In the second part of the book - and indeed, previewed repeatedly during the historical section - Pinker attempts to assemble an explanation of the processes that have driven this trend. He is at pains to point out that none of his explanations suggest that the process is irreversible, and that we cannot shirk our responsibility to hand on a better world to the next generation. The factors he implicates include the ever-consolidating and regularizing forces of the state, whose monopoly on violence tends to extinguish local skirmishes and vendettas, increasing cognitive sophistication across the globe (as evidenced by ever-increasing scores in components of IQ tests), and the intensification and spread of technologies to enhance communication between individuals who might previously have been ignorant of each other's situation or thoughts. I can forgive him his one piece of hubris: he seriously proposes that appreciation of the writings of social psychologists by the masses has been a significant factor in improving their behaviour! The Kindle edition is well prepared for its format, and makes it a physically, if not intellectually lighter task to learn from this book.

If you're a fan of grumpy rationalists, consider yourself a child of the enlightenment, and choke on your muesli when you hear another government spokesman misrepresenting evidence, then you'll love this book. If, on the other hand, none of the above apply to you, your really *need* to read this book! My favourite chapters were on economics and on education, but there's lots here for you if you're interested in science and medicine, a la Ben Goldacre, or politics and the environment, too. I found the opening couple of chapters a bit too polemical and repetitious, but the rest of the book is very lucid and substantial. Buy a copy for your MP!

This is a very well-researched and extremely well-written book dealing with the historical, humane, scientific and clinical aspects of cancer. It is detailed and accurate enough in its discussion of the science behind oncogenesis and cancer treatment that the general reader with a basic understanding of modern biology can get up to speed with this multi-faceted field. In many popular science books, the "personalization formula" seems to be an unhelpful gimmick, but here, the author brings his personal experience of treating cancer patients into the discussion in a well-judged way. The historical sketches of the coming and going of the great fashions in surgical and chemotherapy treatment are well drawn and insightful. This book would be of tremendous value for someone embarking on a medical degree or with a personal interest in cancer treatment. Highly recommended.

I've been using a Thorn Raven Sport model bike for a year (including daily commutes and three cycling holidays), and *really* like the Rohloff 14-speed sequential hub gear system (see [...]). I've just used the oil change kit to perform the recommended annual service and found it to be very straightforward and not very messy. The spent oil was satisfyingly black, and I'm hoping that it is now fully "run in".

This is a commendably readable and pretty comprehensive review of the very interesting field of the chemical origins of life. Deamer enlivens the tale with the usual autobiographical and travelogue elements, which will probably be welcome to many readers, but his accounts of the chemistry and biophysics of hypothetical prebiotic worlds is in any case exemplary for its lucidity - both accurate and accessible. He is particularly strong on the need for compartmentation and the role of membranes, but covers most important areas of the field by judicious choice of examples. For my taste, he deals too briefly with the work of Ganti, Morowitz and Wachterhauser, concerning for example putative metabolic cycles absent sequence information, and doesn't raise the problem of the synthesis of nucleosides (their current pathways of biosynthesis clearly post-date the origin of complex metabolism), but otherwise this book is clearly the most authoritative and readable account of the field in print today.