Rick O'Shea

It has been an astonishing couple of years for Irish published and Irish written short stories, hasn’t it? I genuinely feel like I should apologise that this one got caught up in my backlog of reviews from the last few weeks – I read it just after publication and it’s actually one of the books of the month I’ve chosen for April over on my book club on FB. You know every now and then you get hypnotised by a writer’s style or a series of short stories? For me, Vertigo brings both of those to the table. It’s less […]

See, this is either going to float your boat (appalling pun apologised for) or it won’t. I developed an interest in the whole topic of the movement of globalised goods a few years back after reading Alain De Botton describing the journey of a tuna fish from the seas around Sri Lanka to a suburban Tesco in the UK, so this one had me at the cover page. Rose George’s utterly fascinating (to me anyway) account of a 5 week trip from the UK to Singapore through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, passing along the pirate-infested coast of Somalia, is […]

Briefly, this is an occasionally interesting, sometimes factually dense, ever so often dull series of chapters on neurology. If you’ve read Oliver Sacks over the years or even Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow or the like, I’m afraid you might not find much new here. I did love the section on certain types of epileptic seizures potentially leading to religious conversion even if that did scare the bejeesus *into* me. That was a new one. As was the idea of athletes doing “mental training” when coming back from an injury (literally imaging themselves out on the track or bike). […]