Books - Review

Bill goes hiking on the 'AT' (Appalachian Trail). He and his friend Stephen Katz go for lots of interesting walks in the woods carrying very heavy backpacks.

Very good. Nice light reading, with some smiley humour - well done Bill for making relatively dull subject material quite entertaining for so many pages.

Bill's funny travelogue of science - particularly geology, bit of physics, fossils, evolution and anthropology. Especially anthropology.

Pretty good in fact, although too much on origins of man at the end of the book, it started to feel like we were going round in circles a bit. Re-read in April 05. Enjoyed it more probably and the anthropology bit at the end seemed much better balanced.

Bill travels round America making scathing comments about people and places he encounters.

Pretty funny and entertaining.

Bill travels round UK making scathing comments about people and places he encounters.

Pretty funny in places.

Bill travels around Europe dealing with grumpy hoteliers, waiters, other tourists etc.

Very entertaining, especially the flashbacks to previous trips with the dreadful Katz, and the way he is so rude about the French, amongst others.Re-read this Feb 2010 - pretty funny in places still.

Autobiographical thoughts from Bill, reminiscing on his childhood, and how funny and quaint the 50's were in the USA.

Very funny, laughed out loud several times!

Bill's biography of William.

In fact, due to the almost complete lack of hard facts about Shakespeare, this is mostly Bill's round-up of conjecture, assumptions and scholarly guesswork. Still, it makes a very interesting history of the times.

A social history of mostly Britain. Using the rooms of a house (his own) as chapters and themes.

OK, some really interesting facts and figures like how much glass was used in the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace (a lot), and how much sewage Londoners generate (a lot), and how much sewage used to flow into the Thames (a lot) etc.

A history of events of the titular time/place. Very interesting bio of Charles Lindbergh, quite a bit of aviation stuff in fact, Henry Ford, lots of baseball (made interesting!) and the build up to the Wall St. Crash.

Excellent. Readable, entertaining, interesting. Lots of facts I wish I could remember.

Bill does another tour round a few bits of England making humourous comments as he goes.

Not great, I'm afraid. Not funny enough, a bit dull and repetitive and he does quite a lot of ranting about preserving the countryside and the problems of modern life.

Bill tells us many interesting things about the human body.

Hmmm. Not as good as some of his other work, this one seemed like just a lot of information presented in a bit of a dry way. Lost his knack sightly of the funny wry presentation of details and facts. Good in parts though.