Peter Bernstein tells a fascinating story from Greek times to the present, explaining why it was important to be able to quantify risk, and to take measures to minimise risk. He argues that it is in the management of risk that modern times can be distinguished from the past. Bernstein introduces us to Greek philosophers and Arabic mathematicians, to merchants and scientists, gamblers and intellects. He explains in an engaging style the concepts of probability, sampling, regression to the mean and rational versus irrational decision making.

It is a solid book, 400 pages in length, but the content is very accessible. Some of the short-term predictions have already come true - the merging of TV and the internet and wall-mounted displays. Kaku carries on to discuss mid-term prospects such as the eradication of cancer, and longer term areas such as insterstellar travel. This is my favourite book - the one I would rescue from a burning building!

The book can be separated into two parts: the invention of the web and its protocols and its acceptance around the world, and Berners-Lee's time as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The first part is by far the more interesting.

The Internet is more than just a story of technology, it is the culmination of collaboration between government agencies and commercial companies, innovative people and venture capitalists. The story is a fascinating one, and is very well told in this book.

This book tells a truly amazing story of a group of amazing people.

According to HAL himself in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, his birthdate was January 12, 1997. This book, published by MIT in the year of HAL's birth, considers the many facets of HAL and what progress has been made in each of them. From supercomputer design to speech synthesis, recognition and understanding, from image recognition to lip-reading, artifical intelligence and ethics, this is a quality, thought-provoking book.

An interesting book which shows how we can and must learn from our flaws.

The book also covers the nature versus nurture debate and the troubles caused by attempting to age the earth. Each of these are presented in readable chapters, covering the main aspects of the disputes. This is a very enjoyable book in the "Great Feuds" series.

This story of space flight includes such renowned figures as Werner von Braun, father of the German V2 rocket and head of the American space effort, and Sergei Korolev, sentenced to a Siberian prison camp, but released to head the Soviet rocket program.

This is a wonderful historical story.

ENIAC was an immense milestone in the development of electronic computing. It occupied 1,800 square feet and weighed 30 tons, including 18,000 vacuum tubes. This book tells the tale of how ENIAC came to be.

This book has been written with the co-operation of his widow and family, and is a wonderfully detailed biography of an amazing man who suffered a morbid fear of the sea, yet overcame this to fly over the greatest oceans on the planet. His addiction to fame and flying led him to his great accomplishements, and the mystery of his ultimate demise in 1935. The epilogue of this book describes the author's ambitious expedition to uncover this mystery off the Burmese coast.

This is the most enjoyable biography I have read. I recommend it to everyone.

This is the story of the man without whom the Twentieth Century would not have taken place. A big claim, perhaps, but whilst many people believe that Edison brought electricity to the people and Marconi created the wireless radio, they may not know that it was Nikola Tesla who actually did the groundwork for these inventions.

Tesla was an amazing inventor, ahead of his time. He was a man of science, not of commerce, and this became his downfall. His ideas were appropriated by others for commercial gain, and Tesla died alone and penniless in a hotel room. His story, however, deserves to be told, and this book does so in a very readable way.

This is the story of one of the greatest races in Human history - the race to put a man on the moon. In 1963, a young reporter named Jim Schefter was given the job to cover America's race to the moon. He was given unprecedented access to the astronauts and major players at NASA. This is his book of those momentous years in the 1960s, culminating in the moon landing of July 1969.

Schefter has written a stimulating book which describes the lives of dozens of colourful individuals involved in the Space Race, and describes the far from smooth progress of the project behind President Kennedy's promise to place a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out.

There is only one footballing history worth reading, and it is this 350 page history of Ipswich Town Football Club. The task of putting together this wonderful book was undoubtedly helped by the wonderful story behind the club. Formed in 1878 as an amateur club with all the corinthian ideals of the amateur age, it was not until 1936 that the club and the town embraced professialism. Moving quickly into the Football League and tempting the then Manchester United manager to come to East Anglia, their progress was rudely interrupted - but not slowed - by the Second World War. Only 25 years after turning professional, Ipswich were the Champions of England, half of their team having played their way out of the Third Division (South). The best days of the club were yet to come, with regular forays into Europe under the management of Bobby Robson, the second of two managers Ipswich has provided to lead the Nation's team.

The book contains a wonderful season-by-season narrative which reveals not only great details about the club and the people who moved it forward, but also paints a wider footballing picture as well as setting it all in the social context of the day. The statistical records are amazing, with every line up since 1878 provided, meaning this book has become a reference work for historians and statisticians alike.

For me, as a lifelong Ipswich supporter with a love of numbers, this book hits the mark on both counts!

Who could disagree with this: Play Fair - Don't Hit People - Clean Up Your Own Mess - Don't Take Things That Aren't Yours?

Included are key events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Industrial Revolution, the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain. Closer to home are the pub, the red telephone box, fish and chips, village cricket and whisky. There are literary entries such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the plays of William Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary and simply, the English Language.

Add to this such diverse entries as the National Health Service, the abolition of the slave trade, an obsession with the weather, British humour, Darwin's Origin of the Species, Robin Hood, Punk, the London taxi, the Magna Carta, the British Bobby and trial by jury and you have a glorious summary of the Best of British!

Jim Corbett lived and worked in Northern India and had a deep sympathy and concern for the people of rural India, for their traditions and their folklore. Far from being a hunter for the sake of gathering trophies, Corbett came to the aid of villagers whose lives were turned upside down when tigers and leopards turned to humans as their prey.

To begin to read one of his stories is to be drawn into an amazing journey into the Jungles of Northern India. His style of writing is poignant and evocative. I first read his books whilst in India myself, and they became my constant companions.

I lived in New York in 1994, and this informative and educational book quickly became required reading, enabling me to understand America in ways I couldn't before. It lives up to its tagline, "Everything you need to know about American History but never learned." Organised into eight chapters, each covering a period in America's history, the book works successfully as a series of questions and answers, such as "Did the Pilgrims really land at Plymouth Rock?", "Why was there a war with Mexico?", "Why did the South secede from the United States?", "Who was Jim Crow?", "How did a dead archduke in Sarajevo get America into a World War?", "What was Lend-Lease?", "What was Brown vs Board of Education?", "Did Mississippi Burning really happen?" and "Why was Ronald Reagan called the Teflon President?"

For anybody wishing to take an easy-to-read primer on American history, this book is a must!

This is a beautiful book, with an uplifting message and the true story (and photographs) of a couple making their dream come true. It is an inspiration to us all.

Here is a news story about their journey

It was back in the 1980s when I was lent a book all about the delightful priest Don Camillo and his daily trials with his village people, not least the local mayor, Peppone. Already out of print, this series of books deserve to be in print, to allow these stories to reach a wider audience.

As the author explains, "If there is a priest anywhere who feels offended by my treatment of Don Camillo, he is welcome to break the biggest candle available over my head. And if there is a Communist who feels offended by Peppone, he is welcome to break a hammer and sickle on my back. But is there is anyone who is offended by the conversations of Christ, I can't help it; for the one who speaks in this story is not Christ, by my Christ - that is, the voice of my conscience."

Each of the two dozen or so tales in this book (and this is just one of several books in the series) describes in gentle words an episode in the life of Don Camillo, and tells stories by which we can all live our lives.

This is a comprehensive 600-page book that details the history of South Africa from 1488 and the first encounter between Europeans and the Khoikhoi, the peoples of what is now known as South Africa. It has had a tumultuous history since that time, and this is a definitive record of that history.

I have a strong affection for South Africa, and this book was an educational pleasure to read. It is not an easy read, but is very rewarding.

Kahlil Gibran's most mystical and powerful work has been translated into more than twenty languages. I first read his words in 1987, and they have stayed with me ever since. This paperback version is illustrated with his own drawings. This work contains many beautiful words.

My own favourite words are not, in fact, from this book but from another by the same author, and they are as follows:
"Upon a day Beauty and Ugliness met on the shores of a sea. And they said to one another, "Let us bathe in the sea." Then they disrobed and swam in the waters. And after a while Ugliness came back to shore and garmented himself with the garments of Beauty and walked his way. And Beauty too came out of the sea, and found not her raiment, and she was too shy to be naked, therefore she dressed herself with the raiment of Ugliness. And Beauty walked her way. And to this very day men and women mistake the one for the other. Yet some there are who have beheld the face of Beauty, and they know her notwithstanding her garments. And some there be who know the face of Ugliness, and the cloth conceals him not from their eyes."

A must read for every Indian, and an impressive story for anybody. This book recounts, in great detail, the year leading up to India's independence from Britain in August 1948. Drawing on interviews with the last Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten, amongst others the book paints a wonderfully vivid picture not only of the independence of a nation, but the birth of another: Pakistan. I bought this book whilst working and travelling through India, and it helped me to make sense of the special country through which I was moving.

In the late summer of 2002, I was preparing another European adventure following Ipswich Town. A friend had recommended this book the previous year, when I had gone to Russia. Now, in 2002, I was getting ready to go to Serbia, and decided to read this first-hand account of a modern British adventurer, Fitzroy Maclean. His story is an amazing one: he was posted as a young diplomat to the Soviet Union before WWII, travelling around Central Asia against the wishes of his superiors and his hosts, and during the war he became Churchill's personal representative in the Balkans as he assisted Tito in the partisans' fight against the occupying German forces. He later served as an MP for thirty years, a relatively peaceful occupation considering what had gone before.

500 pages of a gripping account of the adventurous part of his life, this book leaves you feeling as though you were there, accompanying him in his adventures!