Sam Collett

Sam reads mainly non-fiction. Exhausting all the esoteric books about pyramids, god, masons and genetics he has moved on to science and history. Sam lives in Worcestershire with his wife and two daughters and works in a barn.

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, by James Attlee

Reviewed on February 19, 2010

This is the book that I wanted to write.
Like those books that tackle one subject thoroughly, and thereby pull in all of history – the potato, the pencil, Cod – Attlee has described the street in which he lives – a down at heel main artery into the cloistered city centre of Oxford – Cowley [...]

The Secret Symbol: The Original Masonic Documents Behind Dan Brown’s New Bestseller, by Peter Blackstock

Reviewed on December 8, 2009

Here is an oddity of a book, the kind that we only really get when a Dan Brown book or film remake comes out – Brown’s unique mastery of drama fiction matched equally by “the real story”.
It is hard to fault this book, in that it does what it says on the cover. But do [...]

The American Future, by Simon Schama

Reviewed on December 4, 2009

This is a powerhouse of a book.
The crux of the book is that to understand the future we must look to the past. What we get is a series of interlocking biographies and episodes that illustrate, perfectly, one of Schama’s viewpoints about the history of the American ethos. We drift and rush through time and [...]

Madresfield: One house, one family, one thousand years, by Jane Mulvagh

Reviewed on September 29, 2009

Madresfield is a grand country house situated by the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. I live nearby and every year what seems like the whole of Malvern go there for its open day (upposedly to admire the daffodils but in reality to have a good nose). However this book is not simply a local history book [...]

The Google Story, by David A. Vise

Reviewed on July 22, 2009

The history of Google is something all of us should be looking at closely – especially those of us who work in marketing and the Internet. It is clear that we have been caught in the Google web, and that one company has become so powerful that it has changed and is changing some hitherto [...]

Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, by Mark Mozower

Reviewed on July 9, 2009

A scholarly book of epic proportions, Hitler’s Empire deals with a story told by others many times before – that of the destruction wrought by Hitler and his cohorts during the Second World War, and the way they dealt with the territories they invaded and occupied. This is no dull text book though – this [...]

I’m With The Brand, by Rob Walker

Reviewed on May 15, 2009

I’m With The Brand deals with the thorny issue of why we love our brands so much. Brands are, argues Rob Walker, the closest thing that many of us have to a religion. Even though we know that, for example Macs really are just as good as PCs and that brands like Nike are much [...]

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale

Reviewed on April 21, 2009

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is the true and disturbing tale of a well off Victorian family and murder in their midst. The book is really about the reaction to the shocking and unexplained murder at Road Hill House – from the general public and press to the police force, these reaction speak volumes about [...]

Austerity Britain: Smoke in the Valley (Tales of a New Jerusalem 2), by David Kynaston

Reviewed on April 14, 2009

Smoke in the Valley marks the second in David Kynaston’s New Jerusalem trilogy. A World to Build was the first of the books. They form a history of the British postwar years from 1945 – 1979.
There are many reasons why we should consider these two books as one – and I suspect the next book [...]

Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-49, by Jim Baggott

Reviewed on April 9, 2009

Atomic is the tale of the creation of the Atomic bomb during wartime, and the political fallout from the realisation of these powerful weapons.
Baggott bills this as a book for lay-people, not scientists. It is true that this book concentrates largely on the people behind the bomb – the scientists driven in the most [...]

This Is Not A Game, by Walter Jon Williams

Reviewed on March 24, 2009

This Is Not A Game – the novel… It is not often that a book subject is truly unique. This book is the first ever to be written about ARGs or Alternate Reality Games.
Like Williams we need to describe exactly what ARGs are before we can get on with the book proper. Put simply they [...]

The Untold History of the Potato, by John Reader

Reviewed on March 11, 2009

A fascinating example of world history as focused on one object, in the same genre as Cod and The Pencil. In fact after reading this book its hard not to relate the whole existence of the industrial revolution, western dominance – in short world history – to the humble potato. But this is the joy and the problem with this genre; in the end everything is seen through the ‘eyes’ of the potato. To be fair to Reader, he is always at pains to say that the potato is not the cause but one of many factors in such occasions.