A photographic history in big quality softback celebrating the great engineering achievement of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge which he called in his diary 'My first child, my darling.' Along with his Bristol Temple Meads Railway Station, it remains the great ornament of Bristol. Chapters include A Great Publick Utility, The Dirtiest Great Shop, A Rage for Building, This Noble Appreciation of Art, A Monument of Architectural Taste and Splendour, and The Bridge Since 1864 among them, plus facts and figures on Brunel the man, his timeline and a bridge timeline and a Clifton Suspension Bridge Act of 1830. An international symbol of the City of Bristol since its opening in 1864, the strength of feeling for the bridge has not diminished. However, its journey into being was not a smooth one. The funding, design and construction were all fraught with difficulty as Brunel and his contemporaries worked at the forefront of engineering in their time, trying and testing unknown materials, techniques and theories. Five years after his death in 1864, and an astonishing 33 years since construction began, the completed bridge was finally unveiled. An authority on its history, Michael Pascoe uncovers many previously unknown facts about the bridge, Bristol and Brunel himself and he uses outstanding archive and modern photography in this glamorous very large softback. 96pp, colour.

Sub-titled 'The Interaction of Technology and Play' here is a romp through the changing landscape of 19th and 20th century American toys, games, hobbies and amusements and the ways in which technology affects play, and play shapes people. Inventors have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and games, crafting new and extreme forms of recreation, always responding to popular demand. From LEGO, skateboards to beading kits and video games, the text is basically a social history. Some particular technologies for example the bicycle fit into more than one chapter as a toy, a hobby, a sport. There is a chapter on the American Playground Reform Movement and how they were engineered to provide wholesome and efficient activities to children of working class families. A third chapter covers commercial pleasure parks from Coney Island to Disneyland, sites where great collections and machines often imitate the technology of transportation and production through rides, shows and fanciful environments. Crafts seem to prescribe gender rules with heavy tools such as saws and hammers being reserved for men and lighter tools like sewing or knitting needles and paintbrushes reserved for women. In the 20th century new technologies presented new hobbies - operating ham radios, building model aeroplanes, assembling HiFi equipment, modifying cars, and by the end of the century cooking gourmet meals using a wide range of expensive kitchen utensils. The book looks at baseball and basketball, golf and tennis alongside the USA's elaborate road rail work, the rise of mass circulation newspapers and magazines which made national sports possible, pioneer sporting goods manufacturers, the standardisation of playing fields and equipment and through technology, high performance swimsuits and 'anchored' putters challenging the concept of the level playing field. Electronic games it seems have reproduced many of the joys and the alarm of the older toys and is discussed right from the first chapter. 200 page paperback, photos.

The acclaimed science writer builds up reality piece by piece from space to time to matter, movement, the fundamental forces, life, and the massive transformation that life itself has wrought on the natural world. He reveals that underlying it all is not as we might believe a system of immovable absolutes, but the ever-shifting, amorphous world of relativity. From religion to philosophy, humanity has traditionally sought out absolutes to explain the world around us, but as science has developed, relativity has swept away many of these uncertainties leaving only a handful of unchangeable essentials such as absolute zero, nothingness, light - leading to better science and a new understanding of the essence of being human. Chapters cover Space, Stuff, Time, Motion, Gravitation, Life, Creativity and Innovation and Fundamental Relations and an appendix is a brilliant Special Theory of Relativity for Beginners. Relativity explains how much damage will be caused by a car crash, how we can travel through time, and how gravity does its job. The concept of a frame of reference is going to be the central theme in uncovering relativity's role. Then we must bring in human creativity, the relativity of understanding and ideas as highlighted by a famous TV show in the 70s, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. Bronowski recognised that it was impossible to separate a history of science from the development of human culture and it has shaped and transformed that culture and is intertwined with the effective development of an understanding of the place of humanity in the Universe. But before everything we must get to grips with the unnervingly slippery topic of empty space. 310pp.

Samer Nashef is a cardiac surgeon at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge and a world leading expert on risk and quality in surgical care. He tells heart-stopping stories of transplants, coronary artery bypasses, aorta repair and cardiac arrest and also delivers humane advice about medical realities rarely observed - the futility of obsessing over diet, the necessity of calculating risks, the role of decision making, and the resilience of doctor and patient alike. He takes a scalpel to the medical profession and asks if patients get the standard of care they have a right to expect from their surgeons. Nashef is co-creator of the Euroscore System, a safety and monitoring tool that predicts the outcomes of heart surgery and he has saved thousands of lives too. In his spare time he compiles cryptic crosswords for the Guardian and the Financial Times under the pseudonym The Naked Surgeon. His Monologues speed from the transporting of a donor's heart at the motorway hard shoulder to cautionary stories of excessive intervention gone awry in US hospitals, to a traumatic trip to bring advanced cardiac surgery to the Palestinian West Bank. Magnificently warm, Nashef has the best imaginable bedside manner. 276pp, paperback.

With humour and reassurance, at last this is a book on nutrition that tries to make you understand how little we know, answering age old questions and a lot more besides for everyone curious about the everyday products we consume or use. Nutrition is a mess of marketing, classism, science, truth, guilt, confusion and outright hucksterism. Cheese puffs, coffee, sunscreen, vapes, hand sanitiser, Zaidan reveals the weird science behind everyday items that may or may not kill you, depending on whom you ask. If you're curious which health studies to trust, what dense scientific jargon really means, and how to make better choices when it comes to food and health, dive right in. Zaidan makes chemistry more fun than a potions class as he demystifies package ingredients we buy in the supermarket and explains how we know whether something is good or bad for you in exquisite, hilarious detail and at breakneck speed 'with brilliant analogies that even an 11 year old can understand.' Chapters include Microbes Are Trying to Eat Your Food, Plants Are Trying to Kill You, Processed Food Is Bad For You, Right?, Sunburnt to a Crisp, and Is Coffee the Elixir of Life or the Blood of the Devil? 'James Lind ran a controlled trial. On a voyage aboard the HMS Salisbury, he took 12 sailors with scurvy and split them up into six groups of two. Each group got a different potential cure: a quart of hard cider, 75 drops of sulphuric acid, two spoonfuls of vinegar, half a pint of sea water, the 'bigness' of a nutmeg, or two oranges and a lemon.' Can you guess the result? See page 168. Some of the language is utterly hilarious, like DNA, if it were the title of a movie, the sub-titles might read: Your Genetic Code, or The Blueprint of Your Life, or There Is No Such Thing As Free Will. With scientific and also hilarious diagrams, 297pp, paperback. Chemistry has never been such fun.

'The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space'. At 9.07am on April 12th 1961, a top-secret rocket site in the USSR sees a young Russian sitting inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile. Originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead, it blasts into the skies and Yuri Gagarin is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles an hour, ten times faster than a rifle bullet, he circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity and the first human to leave the planet. This magnificent tome tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight and was published for its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first - the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable and in the end the race between them would come down to the wire. Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that have been hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens. He draws on extensive original research and vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before. With blast off colour photographs on the endpapers and dozens of colour photos and archive images in the Plates section, the exciting adventure begins 15 minutes before launch when dawn came quickly into the Kazakh Steppe. 502pp.

A manifesto of ideas for sustainable food production, the book is a tremendous piece from the award-winning environmental journalist. With the world population constantly rising, the human race is facing threats to the planet such as global warming which will have huge impact on our food production capabilities. Topical and highly informative, Amanda Little explores the past along with the present and discovers startling innovations - remote-control crops, vertical farms, robot weedkillers, lab-grown meat, 3D printed meals, water networks run by supercomputers, cloud seeding and sensors that monitor the microclimate of individual plants. She meets the creative and controversial minds changing the face of modern food production, and tackles fears over genetic modification with hard facts. On the whole, the industrialised world is enjoying a more abundant, diverse and accessible food supply than ever before in human history. Farms globally produce 17% more calories per person than they did in 1990 and while some 800 million people still suffer from chronic hunger, that is almost 200 million fewer than there were 30 years ago. Meanwhile prices have fallen. In the 1950s the average household spent about 30% of its budget on food; today it is around 13%. But according to the IPCC, food prices could nearly double by 2050 given current climate and population-growth trends. International conflicts over food resources could interrupt trade and paralyse distribution networks and shortages may be particularly acute in countries like the UK where half of the entire food supply is imported. A Silicon Valley start-up Soylent Inc. has developed a vegan beverage designed to replace the nutritionally complete meal and the Pentagon's research division is developing sustenance for soldiers that can be cranked out on demand by portable 3D printers. Sensors on the soldier's bodies will detect for example a potassium or vitamin A deficit, send that data to the 3D printer, which will then generate customised, nutrient-fortified food bars. The book is a taste of things to come and with an optimistic slant. 340pp, illustrated paperback.

Exotic plants, corals and crocodiles, birds and butterflies. Albertus Seba's extraordinary catalogue of natural specimens is not only one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements but also one of the most prized natural history books of all time. It is a beautiful tribute to the abundance and diversity of Earth's creatures, great and small, as well as a fascinating record of some now-extinct animals. Though scientists of his era often collected natural specimens for research purposes, Amsterdam-based pharmacist Albertus Seba (1665-1736) was unrivalled in his passion. Seba's scenic illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. His amazing collection of animals, plants and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned careful and often scenic illustrations of every specimen. With these meticulous drawings, he arranged for the publication of a four-volume catalogue, covering the entire collection from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, birds, and butterflies, as well as now extinct creatures. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-coloured original. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 512 pages.

'Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness' is the sub-title of this revelatory and revisionist biography of the renowned inventor of the telephone, and powerful enemy of the deaf community. 'Deaf people who couldn't speak were often referred to as monkeys, or prehuman. I didn't know that the chief person behind the campaign to keep deaf children from learning ASL (American Sign Language) was the man who most people thought of differently, pleasantly, as the inventor of the telephone. Or that the movement he led would change forever what was expected of the deaf.' When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous, but few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle - his work teaching deaf people to speak. He was the son of one deaf woman and husband to another, motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world. But he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against sign language and deaf culture that still rages today. The book tells the dual stories of Bell's remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. In 1863 at the age of 16, Bell first started work on his speaking machine, with a mechanical body like an organ with keys to depress different portions and exhale full words. His father Alexander Melville Bell was an elocutionist who was designing a universal phonetic alphabet, one that would be able to document any sound in any language. Melville called his alphabet Visible Speech, because it acted as an instructional guide on how to shape the mouth into different sounds. Each symbol was part of a code of where to put the tongue in the mouth, how to breath, how open the lips should be. Well researched, it is a timely reminder of the flawed humanity that lies behind so much of our technological innovation. 402pp.

The London Brick Company of Stewartby and Peterborough has served the building industry by rail and by road. This second, fully revised edition from Nostalgia Road celebrates the company's history. The guide shares the company's growth, its acquisitions and its delivery service as well as details on the brick-making process. The book explores how the firm emerged from a series of acquisitions of different brick-making firms from the 1880s until a new company emerged as the London Brick Company Ltd. in 1936. It shares how the company grew to become the major producer of bricks in the country and the biggest brick company in the world. Learn how the organisation was well ahead in social thinking by offering better conditions and higher pay levels for their staff in accord with their philanthropic ideals which were similar to the Quakers and the Cadbury family. Discover how, in 1974, the firm bought Whittlesey as the clay reserves in the Peterborough area could be better managed under the control of one company rather than multiple. The book also offers insight into how elite the firm was, highlighting that one of the biggest benefits of the semi-dry brick industry, as typified by the London Brick Company, was the fact that huge quantities of bricks could be produced cheaply by use of the continuous kiln. There are also fantastic images to bring the company's history to life, including a landscape shot of the horse and rail transport at the company's No.2 yard near Peterborough in the late 1800s and a photograph of a London Brick Company vehicle called the Foden DG6 which was a 6-wheeler similar to the brick vehicles requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply in the Second World War. Paperback, 8" x 8.3", colour and black and white images, 52pp.