Extraordinary and beautiful...the most exciting and ambitious work of non-fiction I have read in more than a decade

The book that changed my life... a constant companion

One of the year's most original and outstanding books...fascinating labyrinths of history and human experience, which he perceptively, intructively and absorbingly explores. This is a read to relish

Theodore Zeldin's all-embracing history of our feelings throughout the ages [is] brilliantly original and unsettling... His scope is dazzling... A seductive and unusually thought provoking book

Bubbling wit... Zeldin makes life exciting for the reader. It is like being on some careering fair-ground ride that whirls you from one limelit fragment of civilisation to the next at breakneck speed...gatecrashing all the cultures of the world

It's the sort of book that will go on being famous long after we're all dead... If ever a volume deserved that overused ecomium "this book will change your life", it is this one

A charming and free-ranging history of science

It's the clearest and most beautifully written introduction to science I've ever read. Again and again I found myself saying "Oh! So that's how genes work!" (or stars, or tectonic plates, or all the other things he explains). Explanations I thought I knew were clarified; things I never understood were made clear for the first time

The Magic of Reality provides a beautiful, accessible and wide ranging volume that addresses the questions that all of us have about the universe...written with the masterful and eloquently literate style of perhaps the best popular expositor of science, Richard Dawkins, and delightfully illustrated by Dave McKean. What more could anyone ask for?

This book may be exactly what's needed to increase science literacy for readers of all ages

This book is primarily aimed at teenagers, but plenty of adults will get a kick out of it too...McKean's drawings bring the text to life brilliantly ... Dawkins writes convincingly about everything from chemistry to statistics

Dawkins uses a simple, brilliant technique highly appealing to young and old

Few scientists manage to reach a huge popular audience. Even among them Richard Dawkins is distinctive for the clarity and elegance of his prose. The Magic of Reality... will be appreciated by inquisitive children while illuminating much for the adult general reader.

At once funny, prosaic, sinister and wise, Blum's tale is a beautifully written account of the true human cost of all our remote connectivity

With infectious wonder, Andrew Blum introduces us to the Internet's geeky wizards and takes us on an amiably guided tour of the world they've created ... the Internet that Blum's beautifully lucid prose makes real turns out to be if anything a more marvelous place than the cloudy dreamland we'd imagined

An illuminating journey of discovery

Total immersive reading

A wonderful idea ... a hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking book

Fascinating, absorbing

A quick, absorbing read - a summer beach book with brains

If you can stomach only one end-of-the world-as-we-know it story this summer, none is more audacious or interesting than Alan Weisman's The World Without Us

His is an extraordinary story laced with tragedy

[Root's] life story, vividly related here, is crammed with incident and adventure. Curious, creative and fearless, he has diced with death on numerous occasions and been mauled several times in his efforts to capture the daily lives of everything from silver-back gorillas to leopards in the wild on film. A gripping account of a life well lived