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Russ Litten at The Book Stops Here

Click here for full details.

The City of Light by Russ Litten

Hull Fair has appeared in literary fiction before Scream If You Want To Go Faster. In Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning the hero Arthur takes a brutal kicking at the local Fair, the Nottingham Goose Fair to give its full and traditional title. But after it says farewell to the Midlands, the Nottingham Goose Fair takes the M62 north and changes its name to Hull. I have no idea what happens to the Geese.

I loved Hull Fair when I was a kid. For me, it symbolized the start of a long spell of protracted celebration: my birthday, Halloween, Bonfire Night and then the big one, Christmas. Long dark nights lit up with raw excitement. And it all kicked off down Walton Street in the second week of October.

Hull Fair meant going out in the cold pitch-black and staying up late on a school night. It meant racing lights, head-pounding music, screaming crowds and a stomach heaving with excitement.

The buildup was epic. All week at school you’d hear the kids who’d already been to Fair bragging about the rides they’d been on and parading the exotic plunder they’d brought back. Like Space Dust, the special exploding candy that made the inside of your skull snap crackle and pop. It was magic stuff, like having a head full of static electricity. Space Dust was like glue sniffing for eight year olds. I remember one little lad emptying an entire packet into his mouth and an excited crowd clustering around him to see what would happen. Would he pass out? Maybe he’d explode! Maybe his head would shoot from his scrawny little shoulders, fly up into the damp autumn sky like a super-charged space rocket and explode in a fanfare of sparks. But nothing happened. He necked the lot and then walked away laughing through a mouthful of foam. He was like the Keith Richards of West Hull Primary School.

When the big night finally rolled around it was like being injected with a hypo of raw adrenaline. I’d be almost beside myself with excitement, bouncing around on the top deck of the bus, rubbing portholes in the steamed up windows, straining for the first glimpse of that halo of light.  

As soon as you took your first steps down Walton Street you were besieged on all sides by gaudy temptation. It was like you’d died and gone straight to a seven year olds heaven. There were stalls stacked high with all manner of sweets and treats; giant slabs of pink and white nougat, bags of buttery brandy snap, coconuts banked up like hairy cannonballs, hanging bags of candy-floss, giant red and black licorice laces, sticky red toffee apples and chocolate dipped ones too, smothered in hundreds and thousands. There were steaming chip vans that stank of hot fat and vinegar. Other stalls would be groaning with cut-price piles of treasure, toy swords and dolls, wind up action figures and flashing yo-yos, fuzzy gonks and gremlins, Lucky Dip barrels packed with unknown pleasures buried beneath the sawdust. There was the LP On A String stall, where you hoped to reel in The Soundtrack to Grease or Never Mind The Bollocks but invariably ended up with The Best Of Timi Yuro or The Brighouse and Rastrick Band’s Twenty Golden Greats. My Dad said it was a bloody swizzle and deep down I knew he was right, but hope springs eternal in the breast of an infant pop fan.

Dotted between these emporiums of tat were the street hawkers and vendors, the ruddy-faced men with fistfuls of multi-coloured balloons, the Father Christmases with the nicotine stained fingers and the black bin bags full of early presents, the street preachers jabbing their fingers straight up to heaven, where they claimed Jesus was waiting for us if we would only lift our eyes to see him. The gypsy caravans, the daughters of the ancient sages and soothsayers beckoning you from doorways, offering the gift of second sight, as recommended by Vera Duckworth, Des O’Connor and Orville The Duck; fading faces on the posters outside their portable palaces.

And as you moved through this magical place, besieged on all sides by offers of instant gratification and promises of eternal redemption, your tiny hand gripped in the fist of a parent or older cousin, you always had one eye out for the opening, that gap in the stalls and shows and caravans that would afford you entry into the Fair proper, to the rides and the promise of mayhem beyond.

Hull Fair rides were the stuff of legend. Every year the local paper would scream headlines of kids being catapulted from the newly imported death traps from Europe - the Octopus, the Meteorite, the Dive Bombers, and the Bungee Jump. You would crane your neck to gawp up at these creaking cathedrals of light as their passengers were flung around at breakneck speed, their legs kicking the air above your tiny head and their shrieks of delight whipped away on the wind.

When I got old enough to go on my own or with my mates, Hull Fair took on another dimension completely. As a teenager, the Fair was about courtship ritual and mob mentality, a complete immersion in sensory pleasure, necking various combinations of medicines to aid and abet the carousels of colour. There are a million other stories from these times, some of which ended up in Scream If You Want To Go Faster. But to me now, as a dull and sensory numbed adult, Hull Fair provides a direct connection back to that first thrill of childhood, the drawing in of the darkness, my breath hung in plumes on the freezing October night, and that halo of light above the city where I grew up.

Scream if you Want to Go Faster is out now at Amazon, Play, Waterstones, and all good bookshops.

The Tell-Tale Brain review roundup

The Tell-Tale Brain 

Some of the fantastic coverage of The Tell-Tale Brain from the past few days, as well as author VS Ramachandran’s fascinating TED talk ‘On Your Mind’. Click here to read an extract.

Compelling [and] fascinating - Nicholas Shakespeare, TELEGRAPH

His mission to educate and entertain is perfectly achieved… Neuroscience and stand-up comedy collide with eureka results. ‘[Ramachandran's] “modest contribution to the grand attempt to crack the code of the human brain”, is written with all his synapses lit up like supernovas.TIMES

‘When VS Ramachandran, one of the world’s most influential neurologists, wants to get inside a human head, he doesn’t reach for his scalpel or MRI scanner.  Instead, like Sherlock Holmes (to whom he is often compared), he seizes on an oddity in a case study, then begins a pleasing process of deduction interspersed with leaps of excitingly creative thoughtThis absorbing book charts the acclaimed experiments he has performed around the world…and explains how they have helped unravel the workings of the human mind.’    SUNDAY TIMES

Excellent…My favourite of the trio is The Tell-Tale Brain; I cannot imagine a better account of the sweep of contemporary neuroscienceThe Tell-Tale Brain explains how and why the human brain makes us “truly unique and special, not ‘just’ another species of ape”… will give pleasure to anyone interested in original thinking about the brain.’  FINANCIAL TIMES (round-up of neuroscience books including Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye)

***** Our brains are those of apes: Ramachandran is in no doubt of that, yet at the same time we’re uniquely special too. His life’s work has been about getting to grips with the mental mechanisms that make the miraculous mundane. He goes to real-life clinical cases for evidence of exactly how the brain behaves in action or examines the experimental record for clues to the wonderful intricacy and astonishing scope of the human mind.’ SCOTSMAN

‘An enthusiastic speculator who rarely hesitates in his opinions, he’s a gifted storyteller … Perhaps his greatest strength is his ability to turn neurological case studies into illuminating experiments.’ BBC FOCUS magazine

‘A Holmesian look at what we learn about human nature when the brain goes wrong, written by one of the leading neuroscientists in the world.’ Times (Eureka)

Mentioned in NEW STATESMENBooks to look out for in 2011

 ‘As one of the most prolific neuroscientists of our time, everyone wants a piece of him… Ramachandran speeds from one fascinating topic to the next, with an excitement that’s somewhere between a young researcher on the verge of a great discovery and a small child on a sugar rush… it’s impossible to curb his enthusiasm.’  Interview in NEW SCIENTIST

No Mere Ape, by VS Ramachandran

An extract from the critically acclaimed The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran.

“Now I am quite sure that if we had these three creatures fossilized or preserved in spirits for comparison and were quite unprejudiced judges, we should at once admit that there is very little greater interval as animals between the gorilla and the man than exists between the gorilla and the baboon.”

-THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, lecturing at the Royal Institution, London

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life.”

-SHERLOCK HOLMES

Is man an ape or an angel (as Benjamin Disraeli asked in a famous debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution)? Are we merely chimps with a software upgrade? Or are we in some true sense special, a species that transcends the mindless fluxions of chemistry and instinct? Many scientists, beginning with Darwin himself, have argued the former: that human mental abilities are merely elaborations of faculties that are ultimately of the same kind we see in other apes. This was a radical and controversial proposal in the nineteenth century-some people are still not over it-but ever since Darwin published his world-shattering treatise on the theory of evolution, the case for man’s primate origins has been bolstered a thousandfold. Today it is impossible to seriously refute this point: We are anatomically, neurologically, genetically, physiologically apes. Anyone who has ever been struck by the uncanny near-humanness of the great apes at the zoo has felt the truth of -this.

I find it odd how some people are so ardently drawn to either-or dichotomies. “Are apes self-aware or are they automata?” “Is life meaningful or is it meaningless?” “Are humans ‘just’ animals or are we exalted?” As a scientist I am perfectly comfortable with settling on categorical conclusions-when it makes sense. But with many of these supposedly urgent metaphysical dilemmas, I must admit I don’t see the conflict. For instance, why can’t we be a branch of the animal kingdom and a wholly unique and gloriously novel phenomenon in the -universe?

I also find it odd how people so often slip words like “merely” and “nothing but” into statements about our origins. Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct. On the great Darwinian stage we call Earth, I would argue there has not been an upheaval as big as us since the origin of life itself. When I think about what we are and what we may yet achieve, I can’t see any place for snide little “merelies.”

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. Apes live, contend, breed, and die in forests-end of story. Humans write, investigate, create, and quest. We splice genes, split atoms, launch rockets. We peer upward into the heart of the Big Bang and delve deeply into the digits of pi. Perhaps most remarkably of all, we gaze inward, piecing together the puzzle of our own unique and marvelous brain. It makes the mind reel. How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and chance brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate-your brain-that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of -all.

It is difficult to talk about the brain without waxing lyrical. But how does one go about actually studying it? There are many methods, ranging from single-neuron studies to high-tech brain scanning to cross-species comparison. The methods I favor are unapologetically old-school. I generally see patients who have suffered brain lesions due to stroke, tumor, or head injury and as a result are experiencing disturbances in their perception and consciousness. I also sometimes meet people who do not appear brain damaged or impaired, yet report having wildly unusual perceptual or mental experiences. In either case, the procedure is the same: I interview them, observe their behavior, administer some simple tests, take a peek at their brains (when possible), and then come up with a hypothesis that bridges psychology and neurology-in other words, a hypothesis that connects strange behavior to what has gone wrong in the intricate wiring of the brain. A decent percentage of the time I am successful. And so, patient by patient, case by case, I gain a stream of fresh insights into how the human mind and brain work-and how they are inextricably linked. On the coattails of such discoveries I often get evolutionary insights as well, which bring us that much closer to understanding what makes our species - unique.

 

 

The Tell-Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran is out now in Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, and your local bookshop.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is Director of the Centre for the Brain at the University of California, San Diego. He has a PhD from Cambridge and many honours and awards including a fellowship from All Souls College, Oxford. He lectures widely on art, visual perception and the brain, gave the 2003 BBC Recith Lectures, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Phantoms in the Brain, which was the basis for a two part series on Channel Four TV. Newsweek recently named him one of the ‘hundred most prominent people to watch in the next century.’

The Indignity of Labour by Russ Litten

I’ve always been deeply unsettled by the idea of work. It seemed like a horrifying imposition to me, the notion of giving up your precious time on this bright and beautiful planet purely to make money for someone else; someone who would, more often than not, gladly work you to the edge of the grave and then skip merrily over your lifeless body in search of the next servile victim. This seemed like complete and utter madness to me. It railed against my most basic concept of human freedom.

 All through my childhood, the adult world of work loomed over me like the shadow of a malevolent stepfather. The message was etched clearly in the tired and grimy faces of the adults around me: work wore you out. It sucked the life marrow from you on a daily basis. Work wasn’t about doing the things you wanted to do. It was about doing tedious nonsense that someone else demanded.

Then I left school and all my worst fears were confirmed. The offices and shops and factories were staffed by dull-witted sadists who made you get out of bed when it was still dark and then barked orders they barely understood themselves for eight hours solid until it was time to go home.

Like everyone else on the chain gang, I stepped into line, kept my mouth and mind shut and my sense of injustice quelled. This, it seemed, was how the world revolved. But I still couldn’t help thinking that the act of going to work was like queuing up for a daily punishment dished out by churlish medieval glove puppets. I acknowledge I’m not alone in this idea. Most people probably feel the same. But I couldn’t help thinking that there was an escape route somewhere. I would stagger home in the summertime, past packed pub beer gardens and wonder how the hell they managed to balance the time/money equation to their benefit.

This attitude was probably forged by a recognition flash ignited from an early childhood book: Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. I stood directly behind Tom when his spirit crumbled at the yawning length of Aunt Polly’s fence. And I punched the air with glee when he managed to shackle his free-spirited peers into slapping on the whitewash. Work is anything a body is obliged to do, he said. Dead right, Tom. Only problem was, unlike Tom, I couldn’t talk anyone else into doing my graft for me.   

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were probably the first two books I read all the way through. They lit something up in me. I didn’t want to be part of straight and so-called respectable society, a set-up that killed your time and crushed your spirit; I wanted to run away from the city and live the life of a carefree hobo. Which is all well and good if you live in the Deep South of America at the turn of the century. You can pull catfish from the Mississippi and smoke a corncob pipe as your raft punts gently downstream. If you tried to live a similar dream in the North of England in the Eighties you were more likely to end up picking half-eaten kebabs out of waste paper bins.

And then, when I was in my late teens, I discovered Charles Bukowski. It came as something of a revelation to me, to find books like that: brutal and beautiful, simple and seemingly profound. Books about everything and nothing. Some bloke who was surplus to requirements who just stumbled around in a daze. There it was, the flashbulb in my head again, that light of recognition. I would examine Bukowski nightly. His became the most heavily thumbed books at my bedside. 

I’d first heard about Charles Bukowski via Barfly, the film with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. I thought the central Chinaski character was hilarious; W.C. Fields with a dirty mouth and an oddly saintly mind, a tramp with poise, a piss-stained angel with attitude.

I went looking for his books and found Factotum first. I was living in a crumbling manor in a sketchy area and Factotum chimed true with me. It was another one of those rare and precious times when a book reads you. I would scour Factotum when I got back exhausted from work, crashed out on the couch, afternoon TV on, volume down, the room heavy and blue with smoke. Its lines were so clean and simple and true. I rampaged through it, and then hoovered up every other bit of Bukoswki I could find.

At this point, I was working in the wholesale food industry, i.e., I used to ride shotgun on a wagon visiting local grocers and chip shops and supermarkets, stacking their back yards and cold stores with cut-price King Edwards. It was one of the best jobs I ever had, especially in the summertime. It was like riding around the lawless trading posts of the Old Wild West. I encountered psychopaths and sweethearts in equal measure; there were enough characters in the fruit shops and fish shops to fill ten novels twice over. My partner and I struck cut-throat deals and pulled off outrageous stunts. We traded in bulk carbohydrates and other essential goods, and dealt in cash only. It was like being a pirate on a sea of grimy traffic.

I’ve had loads of different jobs and I’ve tried to make the best of all of them. Puppet seller seemed quite a promising career. My pal Sean had an Uncle who had a job lot of “Huggy Buggs”, a Sesame Street-style character who clung around your neck with the aid of Velcro paws. One mohair-encased arm formed the neck of the puppet and the hand would mouth the words, a pair of rolling cartoon eyes perched on your knuckles. When you were laden down with half a dozen Huggy Buggs you were like the Pied Piper of Withernsea Market. I sold dozens of the little buggers. The only problem came when you were down to the last one. Then people just assumed you were a wandering eccentric.

Bukowski’s book seemed to understand the obvious insanity of situations such as this; the way what’s left of your brain gets pulped into strawberry jam by the endless grinding dismay of it all. Your body drained by day and your mind sucked dry at night. I still don’t think anybody has captured the relentless pointless horror of work as perfectly as Bukowski did in Factotum - although Fred Voss came close with Goodstone. Books like this can make you feel less alone if you ever feel like the world of work has got you by the throat.

Now I am lucky enough to make my money by writing, which has never felt like work to me. But even so, old habits still die hard. That last sentence took me four hours to write, in-between wandering off to make cups of tea and staring blankly out of the window. Maybe I should have been a Lollipop Man. They don’t have to start work until they’re sixty-five.

Now that’s what I call a proper job.

Scream if you Want to Go Faster is out now at Amazon, Play, Waterstones, and all good bookshops.

Making Book Covers - The Shelf of DOOM

Designers: quiet, unassuming, sensitive types who pluck ideas from art heaven and make them into beautiful book covers. Or so I thought until one day I went upstairs and found this: The Shelf of DOOM

Shelf of Doom

This horror show of broken bones, doll’s heads, skulls, and scorched cuddly toys are some of the props that are used to make book jackets. I talked to curator of the Shelf of Doom, Glenn, about the collection of oddities, and also asked him which was his favourite cover at the moment.

The Gone-Away World and its cover source, a hacked up copy of Mark Twain's Diaries

The Gone-Away World and its cover source, a hacked up copy of Mark Twain’s Diaries

‘A key part of The Gone-Away World is the Jorgmund Pipe, which circles the globe and is on fire. We wanted to re-create this and make it look like the book is splitting in half. We used a Stanley knife and an old copy of Mark Twain’s diaries - older books have better quality paper for tearing. (Sorry Mr Twain, it was nothing personal.)’

Photographs on different exposures and The Moment

Aged photos and The Moment

‘We used tea and coffee to age this photo, then scanned it in repeatedly to give it an aged look.’

Bones prop and 206 Bones

Bones prop and 206 Bones

‘These are fake prop-bones that we bought on Ebay. We sprayed them with dirt and tied them with string to make the occultish-cover image.’

A broken violin and The Echo Man

A broken violin and The Echo Man (modelled by Harvey)

‘The blowtorch is the secret weapon in design: this broken violin instantly looks more sinister once it’s been burnt.’

 

Skull and burnt bumblebee

Skull and burnt bumblebee

‘The bumblebee at the back (blowtorch again!) was for a cover that didn’t make it - perhaps we’ll use him somewhere else.’

Tins of spam and fried breakfasts

Tins of spam and fried breakfasts

‘I haven’t found a use for these tins yet but I will: I love collecting weird stuff like this, you never know when it’ll come in handy. So now we have a shelf full of spam - delicious!’

Glenns favourite cover

Glenn’s favourite cover

‘My favourite cover…I guess that’s usually the most recent one published, as it’s the freshest. This week Pocket Notebook early copies came in. I like the blunt depiction of the priapic deranged copper on the front.  Also the type, which is Clarendon Bold: it’s rather ugly and I don’t think I’ve ever used it before, but it seems perfectly appropriate here.’

My thanks to Glenn for giving us access to the shelf, and a little peak at the strange world of cover design.

The Last Job of the Night, by Russ Litten

Scream If You Want To Go Faster started life as a late night anecdote from a taxi driver in Hull.

I can’t remember where we were going, only that it was late and it was autumn and Hull Fair was in town. I was living in London at that point, only coming back to Hull for short spells. It felt both strange and comforting to hear a local accent, despite the bleak picture it was painting. He was a sardonic fellow, this taxi driver, a proper old school King Of The Road type. One of them characters who slouch back in the driver’s seat and steer one handed, maneuvering through the world beyond their windscreen with bemused contempt.

This was 2008, and the talk of impending recession was adding to the weight of sodden woe that the previous year’s floods had left in their wake He was telling me about how things were dead, business was dead, and no one had any money. Lots of people didn’t even have houses. Thousands of families across the city were still in emergency accommodation, and now, to top it all off, people were about to start losing their jobs. Hull has never been Acapulco, but at that particular point it felt that God had loosened his flies and pissed all over the city from a very great height.

He was playing country music on his radio, this taxi driver. In an attempt to join in with the general mood of fatalism, I made some passing comment about pelting myself off the Humber Bridge.

It’s all right you laughing, he said, I took someone up there the other week who wanted to see himself off. About two, three o’clock in the morning. Some young lad. Last job of the night.

What happened, I asked him?

He changed his mind, he said.

And then he related a bare bones version of the section that ended up in the book; how a taxi driver talked a young man out of taking his own life by demanding his wallet.

It’s a remarkable thing to do, to persuade someone to live. In my experience, people who truly want to commit suicide don’t usually pause to have a debate about it, rational or otherwise. It’s not a conversation that many people get to have. So there’s a dramatic scene there to begin with. But the thing that truly intrigued me about this tale was the teller’s ambiguous intentions. It’s fair to say this fellow wasn’t exactly Samaritan material. As far as human suffering was concerned, he seemed to be the Hercules of Indifference.

The encounter stayed with me for weeks. What was this taxi driver’s motive? Salvation? Mockery? Greed? Or just a practical response by a cash strapped cynic who saw an opening? Did he want to save this lad’s life or take his money? His dry and dismissive delivery suggested the latter. When pressed, he refused to acknowledge any attempt at rescue whatsoever. I wanted his fuckin wallet, he said. About a hundred quid in there.

I wanted to believe it was the other way. To me, this was a heroic act made all the more intriguing by a central character that would rather be perceived as a cold-hearted bastard than a hero. I thought he was brilliant. He had saved someone’s life by a daring feat of psychological manipulation. And he refused to seek any accolade. He was like Travis Bickle in reverse.

I decided to write it up as a film script with a pal of mine called Mick Redmonds. We had plans to shoot a short film, but quickly discovered that the two trickiest filming environments were cars and the dark, and our film featured nothing but both. There was talk of other scripts but money and time were in short supply and we both turned our attentions elsewhere.

But the taxi driver stayed with me, so I re-worked it as a short story. And then, with the discarded back-story, I put together another short piece about the lad in the car. Then another about his girlfriend. Before I knew it I was writing about an entire community, some of whom were related through either blood or water, some of which hardly knew each other. All living lives under testing conditions. And then I scrapped the idea of short stories and spun them all together against the backdrop of the Fair.

As the work progressed, I found a few themes kept coming up throughout the creation of Scream If You Want To Go Faster. One of them was the idea of stoicism. In my mind, I saw an active conversation between the cosmic determinism suggested by the floods and the human freedom symbolized by the fun fair. The heritage of Kingston Upon Hull is steeped in stoicism, mainly because of the fishing trade. Six times more people died fishing than mining. We were no strangers to the elements and their potential for sudden cruelty, and I think this has bred a distinct psyche among its citizens; unsentimental and stoic but with a huge hidden capacity for tenderness. Romantic realists. Anchors made from flowers.

I’ve not bumped into that taxi driver again, which is strange for a city as insular as mine. But no doubt he’ll pick me up at some point. And when he does I’ll tell him about how his story turned into a book.

Not that he’ll be bothered, of course.

Scream if you Want to Go Faster is out now at Amazon, Play, Waterstones, and all good bookshops.

Fantastic reviews for ‘The Man Who Recorded the World’!

Some of the incredible reviews so far for The Man Who Recorded the World. Scroll down to hear some of the music from the book!

Szwed’s biography is a worthy testament to Lomax’s passions and ideals, which gifted the world some of the most important American recordings ever made’
Yo Zushi, New Statesman

‘An absorbing portrait of a fascinating life’
**** Sharon O’Connell, Time Out

‘A full account of Lomax’s extraordinary, globe-trotting life’
**** Andrzej Lukowski, Metro

‘In capturing his multifaceted life, Szwed has succeeded in the kind of Herculean task that his subject would have tackled with relish’
Will Hodgkinson, Times

‘What this biography does is convey vividly is a life lived in frenetic motion, one which changed the experience of listening to music for millions’
Daniel Matlin, Literary Review

  

What is the Price of… Everything?

What would you pay for a year of happiness? What is a human life really worth? What do love, knowledge, culture, faith and power cost, and why? And how can orange juice predict the weather?

 

Eduardo Porter’s new book, The Price of Everything, published this month by William Heinemann, starts with a simple idea: behind every decision we make lies a price, whether that’s buying a cup of coffee, taking a new job, or deciding to become a parent. Prices are the invisible thread that connect and explain our society, our economy, our culture, our mistakes and our successes.

 

You can see a trailer for Eduardo’s ingenious and provocative book here, and watch a slideshow featuring some of his more unexpected findings - such as the price of each of Obama’s 2008 election votes cost him, how much it costs to be as happy as someone who prays regularly, or what kind of licence plate $14m will buy you - here. Eduardo is also updating his excellent blog regularly - have a visit and we guarantee you’ll come away with a fascinating fact about human behaviour.

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About Windmill Books

At Windmill Books we publish a small but perfectly formed paperback list stuffed full of literary treats from stunning debuts to bookshelf staples. And if it’s facts you’re after then we’ve got plenty of those too with some truly groundbreaking new non-fiction and some quirky reference thrown in for fun. Come back and visit to catch up with all the latest news, info and author chat. There’ll be the odd competition here too!

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