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Book Reviews
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Official "Top Gear" Calendar 2009 2009
Owen26 December 2008
The calendar is great for any Top Gear fan, features alot of the challengers, the Stig, fantastic!
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Mike Stenman22 December 2008
If anyone hasn't checked out the book Maverick Marketing I highly recommend it. I work in marketing and am consistently bombarded with academic marketing books with no real-world application or real purpose to those of us eating, breathing, and living marketing every day of our lives. This book gets to the root of so many of our problems and uses analogs that you and I are searching for every day. The book is an easy read and has a great glossary at the end that I've even found myself referencing the other day at work since the book was fresh in my mind. Let me know what you think about Maverick Marketing.my guess is that it'll be useful for students and professionals alike. I can honestly echo Humberto Antunes' review - "I just love this book! No beating around the bush, straight to the point. The writing is easy for any cowboy to appreciate, even across the Atlantic!" Also, I haven't found any other work from Tom Hayes but if you can help me out and let me know of any of his other books let me know!!
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Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learnt at School... and Promptly Forgot
Jacqui14 December 2008
Bought this book for a work collegue that I chose in our Secret Santa. He absolutely loved it and also found it amusing, as we are teachers. However before I even wrapped it up my boyfriend had a quick flick through it and said his father would absolutely love it; with all the little snippets of information. I am now in the process of purchasing 2 more copies one for the father, and another for the son incase he tries to nab it again. Thanks for a great complete gift E. Foley & B. Coates.
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Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
DAVID CROZIER12 December 2008
Isn't fouth in a series as you would expect from the title even though all his writing is essentially the same -self knowing,clued up,finger on the pulse on contemopary american pop culture.Knowlegde of music is exhaustive especially heavy metal.Very funny.Reminded me very much of Douglas Coupland.
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Beginner's Guide to Adobe Photoshop: Easy Lessons for Rapid Learning and Success
Angela Brunt27 November 2008
I have found great difficulty in getting to grips with adobe photoshop in the past, but this book showed me how to do things in easy steps and makes it straightforward.
I am so pleased with it that I am now buying one as a present for a friend. -
Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo Modern Classics)
Erin Britton27 November 2008
Expanding on themes that Ray Bradbury first delved into with The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic tale of the ruinous future of mankind, a future where the appearance of happiness is everything and where knowledge and ideas are subversive and criminal. In this bleak future of reality TV and a daily dose of soap operas firemen are no longer excepted to fight fires, instead it is their job to hunt out illegal stashes of books and burn them. In a society where thinking and imagining and questioning are heinous crimes, books are truly atomic bombs. Fire Captain Beatty explains the formula for a happy and contented society nicely when he says "Give the people contests they can win by remembering the words to popular songs. Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie thing up with. That way lies melancholy". Of course not everyone is satisfied with this mind numbing lifestyle. Fireman Guy Montag is stuck with a wife who spends all day with her TV family hankering after a fourth television wall to make the experience more complete and a book burning job that no longer seems as valid as it once did. The only person who seems to understand his questioning nature is his young neighbour Clarisse and, after she and her family mysteriously disappear, Guy begins to horde the books that he should have been burning. Scared by the intrusion of the written word into her very visual life, Guy's wife turns him in to the authorities and he is forced to go on the run, linking up with a group of travelling intellectuals who have each memorised a book for a time in the future when society once again prizes knowledge and learning. Fahrenheit 451 is a great read, all the more so since the world that Bradbury describes isn't so vastly different from the reality of modern life. Books haven't been outlawed but they're far from as popular as they once were, society is shaped more and more by the entertainment industry and there really are adverts everywhere. More of a novella than a full blown novel, Fahrenheit 451 is written in Bradbury's trademark poetic prose style which somehow captures the beauty in destruction and the horror of apathy and is truly a masterpiece of intellectual fiction.
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Erin Britton25 November 2008
Now over fifty years old and perhaps best known for being the source material behind Wolf Rilla"s Village of the Damned, The Midwich Cuckoos is still one of the most enjoyable, inventive, and downright sinister science fiction books out there. In the sleepy English village of Midwich (imagine Midsomer but without the murders) something is amiss. The peace and tranquillity of the close-knit community were shattered when a mysterious silver object appeared in the sky above the village and all of the inhabitants were rendered unconscious. The object in the sky is gone after a day and the villagers awake unharmed, unharmed except for the fact that all the women are pregnant. Nine months later a group of blond haired, golden eyed children that don"t belong to their 'parents' are born. These children grow incredibly quickly and soon begin to demonstrate extraordinary powers of mind control, powers that bring them into conflict with the villagers of Midwich. John Wyndham is one of the most influential of science fiction writers and the Midwich Cuckoos is a classic example of his genius for thinking up extraordinary yet utterly plausible plots. Wyndham has a real knack for creating a slow, seeping sense of dread and building up the suspense and threat through dialogue rather than simply relying on set-piece action sequences which are so frequent in modern sci fi works. The Midwich Cuckoos is a superbly written, intelligent science fiction novel and a must read for anyone interested in the genre.
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Caroline Pierce25 November 2008
Full of vibrant, colourful and inspirational interior designs for the modern home.
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The Atrocity Exhibition: Annotated (Flamingo Modern Classics)
Erin Britton16 November 2008
Although perhaps more famous for works such as Empire of the Sun and the controversial Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition is arguably J.G. Ballard's finest novel. Hugely experimental and non-linear in style, pinning down the plot of The Atrocity Exhibition is no easy busy but it is effectively an examination of the extreme levels of violence found in modern society. Set against a postmodern background of psychological experiments that have gone awry, the central character is a man in the midst of a nervous breakdown, a man whose altered reality is filled with images of celebrities, dead astronauts and car crash victims. Trying to reclaim his sanity, he adopts various personalities becoming in turn a pilot, a presidential assassin and a psychopath. The Atrocity Exhibition is a hugely inventive, if a little disturbing, book of addled musings that is compulsive from start to finish. Every page is full of violence, vice, genocide and insanity. This edition of The Atrocity Exhibition is particularly good since it features extensive notes on the text by J.G. Ballard himself as well as four additional stories and an introduction by William Burroughs.
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Lee16 November 2008
This story is my 18mth old's favourite. He constantly selects it over all others for his bedtime story. The narrative is simple and has a repeating pattern which he is able to join in.
When I read "Just like my..." he chips in with "Dad". He is clearly very pleased with himself.
It is a wonderful story with lovely illustrations. I have now been tasked with buying "Just Like My Mum" by David Melling as my wife is feeling a little left out!!
