|summary=Diane Ackerman's husband, Paul West, had been in hospital for three weeks with a kidney infection and was just rejoicing in the fact that he was to go home the next day. As Diane watched , Paul suffered a massive stroke. The effects were catastrophic, but worst of all, the man who had been a brilliant wordsmith was robbed of his power of speech and lost his extensive vocabulary. It's eight years since this happened and the intervening years have been a constant battle to improve Paul's speech and restore some joy to his life. There have been ups – and many downs – but despite a brain scan indicating that Paul might well be a vegetable he has since his stroke written books. His vocabulary will never be back to what it was, but it remains impressive and, strangely enough, many of the words which he finds easiest to use are those which he encountered a number of years ago.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>039307241X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eleanor Birne
|title=When Will I Sleep Through the Night? An A - Z of Babyhood
|rating=4.5
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=When it comes to parenting, I have discovered that a lot of people lie. They lie about sleep, about tantrums, about feeding and nappies and the effects of a screaming newborn on your marriage. There are books galore, and Mummy blogs, and tweeters all happily proclaiming how marvellous it all is, first of all being pregnant, then giving birth, and then raising the baby. It's all glowing skin and sunshine smiles and meeting friends for coffee. I quickly stopped reading anything baby-related when I was pregnant because I was sick as a dog for 5 months, I had an awful labour and that first year with my little girl was almost impossibly difficult and totally consumed with the horror of a non-sleeping baby. Now, four and a half years on from giving birth and (mostly) sleeping all night long I felt able to open up this latest baby book, mainly because the title roused such familiar feelings in me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846684862</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hugh Bowring
|title=Green Living Guide
|rating=4.5
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=The 'Green Living Guide' is a Magbook - so the format is like that of a magazine - and although it initially seems a little expensive for something that looks just like a magazine you quickly find, on opening, that it contains an enormous amount of interesting and useful information. Even already determined eco-warriors should find something of interest in this wide-ranging guide.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907232060</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Arianne Cohen
|title=The Sex Diaries Project
|rating=4
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=It's often said 'there's nowt so queer as folk'. Surely this should be qualified as 'there's nowt so queer as folks' sex lives'. Arianne Cohen has made a major online database of testimony from people about their thoughts regarding sex - having it, not having it, having it with whom they're with, having it with those whom they're not with. And in every sense, the results can be exceedingly queer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091939356</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Vatsyayana
|title=Kama Sutra
|rating=4
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=''Kama Sutra'', then... What could I possibly say to introduce it that you don't already know or think you know?
For all that Kama Sutra is, it's no longer a guide to the art of pleasure. It's a fascinating historical document, and undoubtedly influential, but it's very much of its time and of its society. Try to follow all its suggestions and at best you'd never get laid again; at worst, you'll be up on a rape charge within a week. (''After sending the nurse's daughter away, he takes the girl's maidenhead while she is alone, asleep and out of her senses...'')
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846141095</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jane Shilling
|title=The Stranger in the Mirror: A Memoir of Middle Age
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Middle-aged women disappear. They are not see on television, their lives do not appear in newspapers, the legions of novels that are written each year rarely feature them. At least, that is what the author Jane Shilling believes as she wakes up aged 47 to find the narrative of her contemporaries and their lives which she has been reading about and living in parallel with since leaving university has vanished. She looks in the mirror and sees a face she does not recognise. Even with a punishing regime of early bed, no alcohol and litres of water, it refuses to regain its youthful bloom. So she decides to take a magnifying glass to this particular moment in time, this journey between youth and old age.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701181001</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jacques Bonnet, James Salter and Sian Reynolds
|title=Phantoms on the Bookshelves
|rating=3.5
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=Translated from French this beautifully presented little book takes the reader into homes boasting book collections, large and small. Studded with succinct and appropriate quotations such as 'there is no better reason for not reading a book than having it' by Anthony Burgess.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694583</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sandy Donaghy
|title=The Longest Journey: Nine Keys to Health, Wealth and Happiness
|rating=4.5
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=How many self-help books have you read where the ideas all seem very good, but they've not been tested in the fire, so to speak? The end result seems good, but you suspect that the starting point wasn't ''all'' that disadvantageous and more to the point, the cynic inside you wonders if the motivation for writing the book was financial gain. Has it made you shy away from such books? Now, I want you to drop the cynicism, because what we have here is a book that's written from the heart and not the wallet and the only motivation in writing it was to help people. Unusual? Yup; it is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1425161065</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roy Vickery
|title=Garlands, Conkers and Mother-Die: British and Irish Plant-Lore
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=For many centuries, plants have not only had practical uses as food, remedies, textiles and dyes, but have also symbolic and folkloric meaning in many different cultures. The term ''plant-lore'' has been coined to describe the profusion of the customs and beliefs associated with plants, and this book gathers together many of the plant-lore traditions of Britain and Ireland.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1441101950</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cindy M Meston and David Buss
|title=Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivation from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=Many many years ago, a man who was far too young to be the fusty, dusty RE teacher he was shaping to be, asked my best friend and I why we were each having sex with our girlfriends. Even aged fifteen I thought something along the lines of 'well, if he doesn't know by now, he never will', and listed that it was great fun, a very enjoyable sensation, showed an appetite for the relationship, and that sex proved the ultimate in bonding - how much closer, to be blunt, could you be to someone than actually inside them? I'll come clean now and admit said girlfriend was not real, but several have been since, and I have had heaps of fun finding out how - and perhaps why - women have sex. I was never to know, until now, there are 237 reasons for it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546639</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Karen Wilkin
|title=Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey
|rating=4
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=I'm all in favour of Edward Gorey becoming a bigger name, especially here in the UK, where his output is certainly less lauded than in his native USA. It's evident from the bright, glossy pages here that he was an extraordinary talent. Polymath and know-all in real life, in his ink drawings he can show the complexity of someone like Dore, while using his draughtsmanship to pen macabre whimsy, like an old-fashioned love-child of Mervyn Peake and Edward Lear.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0764948040</amazonuk>
}}
