Today we took a look back at some of the best books we featured on the show throughout the course of the year. We had lots of requests to put the books up on the web.
The Monster of Florence –Douglas Preston
Douglas Preston was already an established crime writer when, in 2000, he moved his family to Florence. He intended to write a novel set in the city and contacted a veteran journalist for advice about the workings of the criminal justice system. By chance, the man he called on was the “monsterologist” Mario Spezi. Spezi quickly realised Preston was living right next to one of the Monster’s murder scenes. Inevitably, Preston promptly abandoned the novel and decided to write about the Monster instead. He uncovered bizarre details in the case and was cautioned by Italian authorities and can’t return to Italy.
The Bluezones- Dan Buettner
There are certain places around the world where people tend to live longer. More specifically there are five areas called ‘Bluezones’ where the inhabitants seem to defy the aging process. Explorer and National Geographic writer Dan Buettner traveled the world investigating these bluezones and wrote the best-seller ‘The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest’. Dan is attempting to show us what we can learn from these zones and emplpy that in our own lives.
Born to Run –Christopher McDougall
After suffering a knee injurie while running, Christopher McDougall became intrigued with a secretive tribe of Mexican Indians, who were reputed to be the best distance runners in the world. He began to wonder why these people could run for hundreds of miles in open toed sandals, while he was crippled in his Niki runners. He discovers a tribe of runners, the cult of ultra marathon runners and why it might be best to throw away your runners and run barefoot.
The Elfish Gene- Mark BarrowCliffe
In the summer 1976, as a 12 year-old he had a chance to be normal. He blew it. While other teenagers were being coolly rebellious, Mark—and 20 million other boys in the 1970s and 80s—chose to spend his entire adolescence pretending to be a wizard or a warrior, an evil priest or a dwarf. He had discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and his life would never be the same. No longer would he have to settle for being Mark Barrowcliffe, an ordinary awkward teenager from working-class Coventry, England; he could be Alf the Elf. He says that he was thrown in a fountain by football hooligans for wearing an Elf Cloak. He basically thinks it did him harm. He says ‘I couldn’t have been outside playing football with the cool kids. I was useless at it, that’s why I had to go and play D&D, they wouldn’t play with me’
The Real Global Warming Disaster-Christopher Book
The book tells the story of how the belief that the world has to fight the threat of global warming has crept to the top of the political agenda, to the point where, not just in Britain but across the world, governments are solemnly discussing by far the most costly series of measures any bunch of politicians has proposed. Yet he contends that’s it’s increasingly that almost none of the bad things we were promised have happened. In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down. The hard evidence tells us that there have actually beenfewermajor droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades
Hanging from the Rafter – Kieran Shannon
It captures that time in the 1980s when a hallucinatory venture in Irish sport, basketball, more through accident than design, seemed to explode upon the consciousness of an unsuspecting public.
