- Thomas, Dominique. Le Londonistan. Paris: Éditions
Michalon, 2003. ISBN 2-84186-195-3.
-
- Rees, Martin. Our Final Hour. New York:
Basic Books, 2003. ISBN 0-465-06862-6.
- Rees, the English Astronomer Royal, writes with
a literary tic one has become accustomed to in ideologically
biased news reporting. Almost every person he names is labeled
to indicate Rees' approbation or disdain for that individual's
viewpoint. Freeman Dyson—Freeman Dyson!—is dismissed
as a “futurist”, Ray Kurzweil and Esther Dyson as “gurus”, and
Bjørn Lomborg as an “anti-gloom environmental propagandist”,
while those he approves of such as Kurt Gödel (“great logician”),
Arnold Schwarzenegger (“greatest Austrian-American body”), Luis
Alvarez (“Nobel physicist”), and Bill Joy (“co-founder of Sun
Microsystems, and the inventor of the Java computer language”)
get off easier. (“Inventor of Java” is perhaps a tad overstated:
while Joy certainly played a key rôle in the development of Java,
the programming language was principally designed by James Gosling.
But that's nothing compared to note 152 on page 204, where the value
given for the approximate number of nucleons in the human body
is understated by fifty-six orders of magnitude.) The
U.K. edition bears the marginally more optimistic title, Our Final Century. but
then everything takes longer in Britain.
- Goldstuck, Arthur. The Aardvark and the Caravan:
South Africa's Greatest Urban Legends.
Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 1999.
ISBN 0-14-029026-5.
- This book is out of print. I bought my
copy in a bookshop in South Africa during our 2001 solar
eclipse expedition, but didn't get around to
reading it until now. You can occasionally find used copies on abebooks.com, but the prices quoted
are often more than I'd be willing to pay for this amusing but rather
lightweight book.
- Graham, Richard H. SR-71 Revealed. Osceola, WI:
Motorbooks International, 1996. ISBN 0-7603-0122-0.
- The author, who piloted SR-71's for seven years and
later commanded the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, provides a
view from the cockpit, including descriptions of long-classified
operational missions. There's relatively little discussion
of the plane's development history, engineering details, or
sensors; if that's what you're looking for, Dennis Jenkins' Lockheed SR-71/YF-12 Blackbirds
may be more to your liking. Colonel Graham is inordinately fond of
the word “unique”, so much so that each time he uses it he places it
in quotes as I have (correctly) done here.
- Zakaria, Fareed. The Future of Freedom. New York:
W. W. Norton, 2003. ISBN 0-393-04764-4.
- The discussion of the merits of the European
Union bureaucracy and World Trade Organisation on pages 241–248 will
get you thinking. For a treatment of many of the same issues from
a hard libertarian perspective, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed
(June 2002).
- Benford, Gregory ed. Far Futures. New York: Tor,
1995. ISBN 0-312-86379-9.
-
- Wells, H. G. Mind at the End of Its Tether
and The Happy Turning. New York: Didier,
1946. LCCN 47-002117.
- This thin volume, published in the year of the author's
death, contains Wells' final essay, Mind at the End of
Its Tether, along with The Happy Turning,
his dreamland escape from grim, wartime England. If you've a
low tolerance for blasphemy, you'd best give the latter a pass.
The unrelenting pessimism of the former limited its appeal; press
runs were small and it has rarely been reprinted. The link above
will find all editions containing the main work, Mind at the
End of Its Tether. Bear in mind when pricing used copies that
both essays together are less than 90 pages, with Mind
alone a mere 34.
- O'Leary, Brian. The Making of an
Ex-Astronaut. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1970. LCCN 70-112277.
- This book is out of
print. The link above will search for used copies at abebooks.com.