Spartacus Review

Volume 4: 24th October, 2007

Biography

Title: Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian

Author: Iain McLean

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Price: £15.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Adam Smith

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This book aims to show that Adam Smith (1723-90), the author of "The Wealth of Nations", was not the promoter of ruthless laissez-faire capitalism that is still frequently depicted. Smith's "right-wing" reputation was sealed after his death when it was not safe to claim that an author may have influenced the French revolutionaries. But, as the author, also, of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", which he probably regarded as his more important book, Smith sought a non-religious grounding for morals, and found it in the principle of sympathy, which should lead an impartial spectator to understand others' problems.

Title: Suffer and Survive

Author: Martin Goodman

Editor:

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: £14.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: John Haldane

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John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was one of the greatest and most colourful of British scientists, acknowledged as the leading physiologist of the era at a time when physiology and much of medical science was coming into its own. The most successful serial self-experimenter in the history of science, Haldane crawled through the carnage of underground explosions, locked himself in sealed chambers, breathed in lethal cocktails of gases, sampled his own blood, burned and healed his own flesh, and experimented on his own children, in an obsessional push to understand the nature of human respiration. What is expired air? How can you make coalmines safer? What does carbon monoxide do to people? These are just some of the vital questions to which Haldane provided the answers, saving thousands of lives in the process. He also designed the first space-suit and invented the gas-mask, among many other innovations and contributions we still benefit from today. Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, Martin Goodman's lively and revealing biography casts new light on one of the greatest eccentrics of British scientific and intellectual life.

Title: The Man Who Stopped Time

Author: Brian Clegg

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Publisher: Sutton

Price: £20.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Photographers

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This book tells the vivid story of the pioneer of photography, Eadweard Muybridge. His extraordinary personal story has all the ingredients of drama. He was born in the English suburbs, and set out to seek adventure and fortune in the American Wild West. While visiting Europe his coach overturned, and he was treated for a fractured skull. It was at this time that photography grew. Muybridge became a pioneering innovator, who not only invented new methods of photography, but devised 'a flying studio' which enabled him to dvelop his pictures in the field. He was betrayed by his wife, and risked everything by killing her lover. Muybridge's work is iconic, the picture of the moving horse, which proved how it lifted its four feet off the ground simultaneously, known throughout the world. His distinctive stop-motion pictures of men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living, have become some of the most famous images in the history of photography and science.

Title: Ian Botham: My Illustrated Life

Author: Ian Botham

Editor:

Publisher: Cassell Illustrated

Price: £18.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Ian Botham

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Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the debut of one of the world's greatest cricketers, this will be an official book, with authoritative text from Mark Baldwin ("The Times"), supported with lavish full colour and b/w photos of Ian Botham's life and cricket career. Following his Test debut in 1977, Ian will be choosing the best photographs that highlight his finest moments in the game, and working alongside Mark Baldwin, he will caption each of them as well as provide an extended introduction on the countries he has played against, players he's faced, and characters he's met along the way. His friend and rock legend, Sir Mick Jagger, will provide the foreword. This will be the only book anyone will need to track the meteor-like career of one of the game's greatest players, as well as see what he gets up to behind the scenes, including his legendary charity walks for John O'Groats to Lands End.