Igor Clark

The Book Description makes some very bold claims about this book, namely that it is a "landmark in linguistics and cognitive science. [..] the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax".

Does Jackendoff live up to these claims? Not entirely, in my view. However, right or wrong, Jackendoff's rich synthesis of some of the distinct traditions of linguistics research is far too interesting to be ignored. For 'post-Chomsky linguisticians', sympathetic to the early Chomsky programme but disillusioned with more recent work, this book is an essential read.

Although linked by a common theme, the book's sections have different orientations. Careful arguments for the overall theme of language involving "multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components" are accompanied by more speculative thoughts on the evolution of language and proposals for future research.

Although lively and readable, this isn't really a book for someone with no background in generative linguistics (compared to, for example, Pinker's recent "Words and Rules"). But for those with this background, buy and enjoy -- you may want to applaud or protest, but you're unlikely to be indifferent!

According to The Skeptical Environmentalist the hole in the Ozone Layer is healing. The Amazon has shrunk by only 14 per cent since the arrival of Man. Only 0.7 per cent of species will be driven to extinction over the next 50 years. Even the poorest humans are getting richer by the year. Things are not good enough; but they are far, far better than we have been taught to believe. Lomborg, a professor of statistics and a former Greenpeace member, reveals the complexity, confusion, and (rarely) misuse of data behind the current Litany of approaching environmental Armageddon. But this is not a comforting or reassuring read. Nor is it a bible for lackeys and do-nothings. Lomborg uses the same figures everyone else uses, from national governments to the Kyoto summit to Greenpeace. Rarely have the raw data been discussed in such detail: their history, how they are calculated, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Lomborg argues persuasively that our sense of approaching human and environmental disaster is an artefact of the valid work of modern scientific, environmental and media institutions. There is, he asserts, no one to blame for our growing sense of despair, but everything to learn. We must learn what real risks are, and what we can do about them. (Kyoto? A very bad idea...) We must prioritise. (30p on the organic basil? Or 30p to buy a child clean water in Sierra Leone?) There is, after all, room for manoeuvre; panic achieves nothing. This is our generation's Silent Spring: a book to rewrite the environmental agenda, and a must-buy for any parent who wonders what kind of world we are leaving for our children.--Simon Ings

This book presumes that you have a deep, broad acquaintance with philosophy, literature, music and psychology, setting the bar high enough to deter all but committed and highly educated readers. Those undaunted by this barrier will find themselves amid an awesome tour de force of philosophical inquiry. Author Martha Nussbaum uses the ancient foundations of stoicism as a platform for a theory about emotions that, curiously enough, elevates and honors emotions - the same unruly forces that the Stoics eradicated. Yet, unfortunately, Nussbaum wrote her 700-plus pages so dryly that she makes even the story of a lonely man rescuing a little stray dog as bloodless and dusty as a mummy. Recounting her mother's death, she betrays the flicker of a tear, but quickly dries it with the towel of analysis. It seems strange that a study of the emotions should be so barren of emotional content. However, we assure persevering readers who keep digging through the dry sands of this book that they will discover some marvelous intellectual architecture buried deep beneath.

Graham Hancock's latest foray into the murky uncharted waters of the past is, in this case, exactly that--Underworld is an exploration of what lies beneath the sea, mainly off the coasts of India, Malta and Japan. Hancock, well known for his disputes with orthodox archaeologists, argues that they ought to be looking underwater for submerged ruins, and that by not doing so they are stubbornly holding on to out-dated and incorrect theories. Hancock doesn't have a lot of time for academics. Most of them, he seems to suggest, having spent their careers safely in their ivory towers, are unwilling even to consider new paradigms which could overturn everything they have learnt and taught. And Hancock's thesis would do just that.

In Underworld--the book of his Channel 4 TV series--he argues that far from springing out of nowhere some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, civilisation has been with mankind for many millennia longer. With the aid of a geologist at Durham University, Hancock examines which coastal areas vanished beneath the sea as the ice melted at the end of the last Ice Age, a catastrophic inundation he finds in the Flood myths of most of the world's traditional religions. And then he goes diving and finds, in some cases, incontrovertible ruins; in other cases the piles of stone might well be natural rock formations, but Hancock argues for their human origins.

Hancock accepts that he is neither a historian, an archaeologist nor a geologist. Some of his arguments tend to be rather speculative, and some of his conclusions may well be wrong--it's not always a good thing to ignore the experts! But in this massive book--well over 700 pages--he does provide sufficient evidence for flooded ruins that ought to be studied by real scholars. And if a few cherished paradigms are overturned in the process, surely this is what science is all about. --David V Barrett