Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain
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As one of the largest predators left in Britain, the fox is captivating: a comfortably familiar...
Maria Sibylla Merian. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium
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Maria Sibylla Merian was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator. She is considered by none...
Keeping the Love You Find
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Your dream of finding a partner is a natural and normal human instinct and your dream is perfectly...
The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People
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Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the...
Why Liberalism Failed
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Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded? "One of the most important political books of...
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom
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Some stories are universal. They play out across human history. And time is the river which will...
Historical fiction
David McK (3425 KP) rated Kingdom of Bones (Sigma Force #16) in Books
Oct 22, 2023
It was a little uncomfortable doing so at first, especially as the main driver for the plot was the start of a worldwide pandemic that badly affected the Human Race.
Caused by mans encroachment of, and deforestation of, Nature.
Sound at all familiar?
Indeed, in his foreward the author even states that he debated finishing the novel for that very reason ...
Anyway, once you get past the uncomfortable feeling, what you have here is a fairly standard Sigma Force story, with Guy Pierce and his team racing against the clock to find the cause of, and a cure to, the contagion whilst other members of the team look for a scientific solution.
I have to say, however, that this particular entry didn't gel as much with me: perhaps because of the complete sidelining of Seichan and Guy's home life? Perhaps because I didn't find the heavy focus on the natural world as interesting as those that focus more on history (and mythology).
Whatever the reason, it just didn't come across as enjoyable to me.
In between chapters, the narrator simultaneously includes his own first-person account of his visit to Chernobyl and the neighbouring ghost town of Pripyat, some 32 years after the fallout which killed, injured and displaced so many people in the Ukraine.
Included in the text are photographs of the sarcophagus, the ghost town of Pripyat and documentation from the official enquiry (in translation from the original Cyrillic text). One of the most enthralling chapters is a very stomach-churning, matter-of-fact detail of what actually happens to a human body when affected by radiation poisoning. This chapter is seriously not for the faint-hearted!!
Leatherbarrow has done an absolutely fantastic job here, over 5 years of research to build an account of something I have heard of all my life but no writing has quite enthralled me like this book did. The juxtaposition of the historical and the modern help to transform this text from the dryly historical account that it could have been into a thoroughly readable and dare I say unputdownable account of one the the worlds biggest nuclear disasters.
Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President
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Of the original Gilded Age, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: "There is no other period in the...
Isaac Newton: Pocket Giants
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Isaac Newton had an extraordinary idea. He believed the physical universe and everything in it could...