The Unblemished artfully interweaves the stories of a serial killer who believes he is the rightful son & heir to an ancient ...

We all know that things go wrong: wine stains, toast burns, computers crash. But how many of us pause to think why these accidents happen? Undercover Scientist Peter Bentley is fascinated by the science of the everyday, & in this eye-opening book, organised in the form of one of those days when everything falls apart, he probes into the reasons why mishaps occur, from sleeping through the alarm to making the bathwater overflow. As he does so he explains exactly what happens when you put metal in a microwave (the electric field inside the oven causes it to heat up like a lightbulb filament) & why getting the juice from chilli peppers in your eye is so painful (they contain a chemical that fools your nerve-endings into behaving as though they've been burnt). & from there he goes on to show how these simple events form part of a pattern of scientific principles that govern everything around us. If you want to find out how a diesel engine is able to run on chip fat or why lightning actually does strike the same place twice, The Undercover Scientist has all the answers. ...

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them & to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love & grief. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness & functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living & the living who have dies' with the same outrage & amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died & to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands & hypochondriacs, lovers & suicides. These are essays of rare elegance & grace, full of fierce compassion & rich in humour & humanity
- lessons taught to the living by the dead.
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