Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science.The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, A Short History of Nearly Everything is the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

Cells and organisms - Energy - Homeostastis - Response and co-ordination - Reproduction - Development - Heredity - Genes and development - Evolution _

Hoop Dreams: Directed by Steve James. With William Gates, Arthur Agee, Emma Gates, Curtis Gates. A film following the lives of two inner-city Chicago boys who struggle to become college basketball players on the road to going professional.

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school. Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning. The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

Как было в Анне Карениной, мадам Бовари и Отелло, так и в жизни. Большинство форм частного порока и общественного зла разжигаются и поддерживаются ложью. Акты прелюбодеяния и другие личные предательства, финансовые махинации, коррупция в правительстве - даже убийства и геноцид - обычно требуют дополнительного морального дефекта: готовности лгать.