Rose Shapiro has written for newspapers, magazines and medical journals including the Independent, the Observer, Time Out, Good Housekeeping and the Health Service Journal. She lives in Bristol.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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On Beauty by Zadie Smith
A witty, moving and compelling account of the lives and loves of two feuding families set in London and New England, this novel owes much to Smith's devoted reading of E.M Forster's Howards End. I found re-reading this immediately after On Beauty illuminated both books and their writers.
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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
'John was talking, and then he wasn't'. This astonishing and crystalline account of the year following the death of Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne anatomises the experience of grief, and how the loss of a partner can shatter everything we thought we knew was true.
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Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses by Andrew Malleson
The diagnosis of whiplash costs the US more than $18 billion a year, as well as permanent disability in thousands of victims. Malleson closely argues that whiplash is a disorder fabricated by the modern medical and legal professions, who attract clients with the prospect of huge sums in compensation. What might have been a neck strain that heals in days or weeks becomes a way of life.
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Tristram Stuart has been a freelance writer for Indian newspapers, a project manager in Kosovo and a prominent critic of the food industry. He has made regular contributions to television documentaries, radio and newspapers on the social and environmental aspects of food.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Collapse by Jared Diamond - Buy the book
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - Buy the book
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond - Buy the book |
Jared Diamond takes the human story from its origins millions of years ago up to the present and into the different potential future scenarios we are facing today.
There is nothing better for an understanding of human behaviour, particularly our over-exploitation of the environment - and what we can do to avoid the worst consequences of this.
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Jeremy Taylor is a popular science television producer who has made numerous programmes informed by evolutionary theory, including two with Richard Dawkins. Not A Chimp is his first book.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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A Devil's Chaplain by Richard Dawkins
If I wanted to steer any child into a career in biology I would give them every one of Richard Dawkins' books on evolution. But if I simply wanted to convince them of the paramount value of independence of thought, rationality, courage of conviction, and faith in the scientific method - as opposed to blind faith or credulity in the face of humbug, religious doctrine, political jargon or any form of propaganda - I would give them the agnostic sermons of A Devil's Chaplain.
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The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams
Our Cro-Magnon ancestors left an artistic legacy in the wonderful cave drawings of Lascaux and Altamira. But Lewis-Williams turns our interpretation of them on its head by showing, in this tour-de-force of palaeo-anthropological detective work, that cave-art was not simply a talented depiction of the animals Cro-Magnons depended on, but a metaphor for their understanding of their own consciousness - where the walls of the cave represented its limits and operated as a membrane between their mental world and the spirit world from where visions and imagination came. A brilliant excavation of the dawn of the human mind.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A bleak but intensely moving story of the power of love between a father and son on a desperate journey to attempted survival in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter world denizened by the desperate, murderous dregs of humanity. A gripping indictment of the worst of which humanity is capable and an invocation of the hope, love and tenacity that may yet allow us to survive it.
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