Category: Books

Assessment 8 out of 10 This is one of those books I wouldn’t have read without the book club. It comes across as a serious work by a serious thinker. Dopamine is a chemical messenger. A variant of one of five dopamine receptors apparently appeared 50,000 years ago. (How do they know?) This it is … Continue reading  The Explorer’s Gene by Alex Hutchinson (2025)

Assessment 10 out of 10 This is a wonderful book, but not an easy read. It reflects deep and wide reading and is a long history of political & territorial structures. Throughout Schiedel puts forward counterfactuals. Effectively what was the minimum change to result in a different outcome.  He also suggests secondary counterfactuals. If the … Continue reading Escape from Rome; the Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidal (2019)

Assessment 7 out 10 This is a difficult book to review. It is very readable. It combines personal stories with a reversion to the Great Man Theory of History with the Great Men (& occasional Great Women) generally coming out of it badly. In 1932 Gandhi threatened to fast unto death against separate electorates for … Continue reading Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple (2025)

Assessment 10 out of 10 This is a great book taking a long view of history. My experience at University was of New Geography based on models. This is New History involving models. My high assessment isn’t to say that this is an easy read. It isn’t.There are four core arguments. First human inequality is … Continue reading The Great Leveller; Violence and the History of Inequality by Walter Scheidal (2017)

Assessment 9 out of 10 The Troubles lasted 30 years from 1968 to 1998 with 3,720 deaths, This compares with the Rhodesian Bush War when 30,000 died in the 15 years between 1964 and 1979, perhaps 1,000 on the Rhodesian side, (10  times more) and the Ukraine war, which has recorded so far 2022-5 more … Continue reading Making Sense of the Troubles (2012) by David McKitrick & David McVea

Assessment 9 out of 10 I was lucky enough to hear Dr Fry at last year’s Jersey Festival of Words. The book is the product of deep research into records which were long kept secret. Some remain closed. The focus is on women’s unrecognised contribution to British intelligence during a period from the First World … Continue reading Review of Women in Intelligence by Helen Fry (2023)

Liebling was a journalist for the New Yorker. The Road Back to Paris is his collected despatches from France, Britain, the US and North Africa during World War Two.  The articles were written over the years 1939 to 1944 and can be read individually or as a continuing story. Journalism of such high quality becomes … Continue reading Review of The Road Back to Paris by AJ Liebling (1944) Assessment 7 out of 10

This is one of those books I wouldn’t have read had it not been for the book club. It is beautifully written. Peppiatt is an Art Historian who went to Paris in January 1966 to try to meet Alberto Giacometti but found he had just died. Peppiatt spent the next thirty years there retracing the … Continue reading Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt (2023) Assessment 9 out 10

                                                                        Review by                   Ruth Urben Score:                                                              As a book    8/10        Reader satisfaction    9/10 Disclaimer.  What follows is an incomplete and rapid summary of my initial understanding of the book after a single and too hasty read.  The review, more of a synopsis, was written for an informal book group whose other members had not … Continue reading Who We are and How We Got Here by David Reich (2018)

Caliban & the Witch, the Body & Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Frederici Assessment 3 out of 10 Leonard & I take it in turn to buy the books selected for review. It was his turn to buy Caliban & the Witch ( the title comes from Shakespear’s Tempest) & before reading it, dropped it in … Continue reading