HOWZAT

Baroness Greenfield, a noted neuroscientist, admits upfront that she wrote this book instead of a science fiction novel. Since it discusses “how 21st-century technology is changing the way we think and feel”, it should probably give SF novelists some ideas. The life to come is not perhaps likely to be as Utopian 1950s ads imagined it — streamlined designer kitchens full of gleaming labour-saving white goods and a clean, smiling, well-fed, disease-resistant nuclear family round the table tucking into TV dinners. The obverse, of course, is the dystopian vision of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Progress comes with a price tag, societal and personal. Greenfield compares the fast-track progress of first world economies with the catch-up developing economies of the world, arguing that technology may create a divergence so serious that the exploitative “have” world will possess little in common with the looted “have-not” world. The result will be increased resentment that creates terrorism. This is an urgent book, personal and political, that makes a plea to use new technology humanely.

THE SENSE OF BEING STARED AT
By Rupert Sheldrake
Arrow, £7.99

Scientific rationalists turn up to heckle Rupert Sheldrake when he talks about the possibility of telepathy, and about probable evidence for a premonitory seventh sense in humans. The material in this book puts anecdotal evidence of hypersensitivity to the scientific test, discusses case studies of the seemingly paranormal, and provides at least a basis for rethinking “the miracle of the senses” as something more mundane and realistic.

LORDS OF THE ATLAS
By Gavin Maxwell
Eland, £11.99

Reissue of this 1966 travel classic is welcome: Maxwell, best known as the author of Ring of Bright Water, is always as lethally elegant in his style as the rulers of the High Atlas of Morocco from 1893-1956. Madani and T’hami el Glauoi, warlord brothers, were supported by the occupying French who mostly turned a blind eye to their excesses. The fantastical, farcical mix of anachronistic brutalities and aristocratic ambitions fires Maxwell’s imagination for the exotic and the outré.

WALKER EVANS: The Hungry Eye
By Gilles Mora & John T. Hill
Thames & Hudson, £16.95

The photographs of the Depression-stricken American South, published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are Walker Evans’s best known works. But Evans had been recording the ordinary lives of John and Jane Doe before that, and his 1938 exhibition American Photographs is reproduced in this book — a monument to a radically modern, yet universally significant, frontal approach to reality by an artist of American life.

WHERE AM I AND WHO’S WINNING?
By Andrew Baker
Yellow Jersey, £10.99

Pity the sports journo running for a plane, bullet train or bus with a bag full of dirty laundry and a deadline to meet — but maybe not too much if he can still crack a joke while weeping into his beer at the Dead Goat Saloon and filing copy for a second-division game. Baker springs a nervy tic of hilarity throughout his global, at times gormless, misadventures in pursuit of a sporting fix. The way he tells it, you’d reckon him a dead ringer for Private Eye’s sports hack E. I. Addio.

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