Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive & personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. Here, Gould once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts & their history, ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century & Isabelle Duncan's nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture & palaeontology to Freud's weird speculations about human phylogeny & recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always, the essays brilliantly illuminate & elucidate the puzzles & paradoxes great & small that have fuelled the enterprise of science & opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders. ...

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive & personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. Here, Gould once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts & their history, ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century & Isabelle Duncan's nineteenth-century attempt at reconciling scripture & palaeontology to Freud's weird speculations about human phylogeny & recent creationist attacks on the study of evolution. As always, the essays brilliantly illuminate & elucidate the puzzles & paradoxes great & small that have fuelled the enterprise of science & opened our eyes to a world of unexpected wonders. ...

It is 1966. Stephen is off on a French exchange, but on the ferry he meets two glamorous new friends of his older brother, Rob, who has been missing for 18 months. They persuade Stephen to travel East with them in search of his brother. He survives drug busts & betrayal in Istanbul, & as he drifts further & further into Asia, the nature of his journey changes utterly. He realises that he is not searching for his brother, so much as struggling to come to terms with a betrayal of trust by his favourite schoolmaster. ...

Joanna, a writer for an erotic magazine, is coerced by her attractive boss Adam to become the prize in a competition. The sexually diverse readers of her column all want to initiate her into their favourite deviant pastimes. After her initial nervousness she begins to relish her role as a sexual journalist. However, she is constantly distracted by anonymous invitations from someone who professes to know her innermost fantasies. The letters claim to know her, & suggest that she should be punished for her depravity. As her submission deepens, Joanna is forced to face the fact that Mr Anonymous may well be right.

A fabulously naughty tale of filthy antics in everyday places. Based on the real experiences of scene players, this is shockingly adult material.

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Born in 1940, one of eight children, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. Her father, a scholar in China, ran a laundry business & a gambling house in California; her mother, a doctor in China, helped with the laundry & worked in the fields. Maxine won scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley, where she returned to teach as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. But alongside her academic life, she had embarked on a career as a writer, & her extraordinary books have become key texts in the American canon.

In many ways this memoir recalls her first major work The Woman Warrior in which she blended Chinese myth with fiction & autobiography to reflect on her mother's past life in China & the experience of immigrants to America. In I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich & complex life of literature & political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a fictional journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the villages of her father & mother.

Beautifully written, endlessly thought-provoking, this is an important book from one of the major writers of her generation.



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