|summary=Dennis O’Donnell spent 7 years working in a Scottish hospital and this is the account of his time there. It takes a special type of person to work in Mental Health services, and though O'Donnell ultimately leaves the Locked Ward, he clearly is one of those people, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this wasn’t his life long vocation, having previously worked as a school teacher (some might say an equally challenging role).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224093606</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
|author=Denise Kiernan
|title=Signing Their Rights Away
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=
Many Americans believe that the Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of the American democracy, the fountain-head of the American Way of Life and the American Dream. The 4th of July is the national holiday and often thought to be the single most important date in American history.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>159474520X</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
|author=Richard Heinberg
|title=The End of Growth
|rating=3.5
|genre=Business and Finance
|summary=With the newspapers full of economic doom and gloom the last thing you might want is to pick up a book that reiterates it and then some. But while this book may seem at first glance to be a bit of a downer, it also provides an insight into how things might just work out ok in the end. Yes, they’ll be some big changes – there have to be because the direction we’ve been heading in is just not sustainable – but if we’re willing to adapt, we will survive was the main message I picked up as I flicked through the pages.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905570333</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lammy
|title=Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Just about everyone in the country was shocked as pictures of the 2011 riots (which began in Tottenham and spread to other major cities in the UK) unfolded on our television screens. Everyone, that is, except David Lammy, MP for the area. He might not have known when it would happen or what would trigger the riot, but a year before, he said that it would happen. This wasn't a lucky guess: Lammy was born in Tottenham and brought up on the Broadwater Farm Estate as one of five children raised by his single-parent mother and he knows what's happening on the ground.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0852652674</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
|author=Luke Harding
|title=Mafia State
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=
Luke Harding set himself a difficult task when he took up his post as the Guardian’s main man in Moscow. He had already put his name to a front page story which appeared in the Guardian in April 2007. This was an account of an interview with the arch-oligarch and Kremlin critic, Boris Berezovsky. Harding was not at the interview but added background to the article from Moscow. However, to be in any way associated with Berezovsky was sufficient to incur the wrath of the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB – the successor to the KGB. The offending account was entitled, 'I am plotting a new Russian revolution - London exile Berezovsky says force necessary to bring down President Putin'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085265247X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ed Vulliamy
|title=Amexica: War Along the Borderline
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=More than 38,000 people have been killed in the last 3 years in what Ed Vulliamy argues is an unacknowledged war, on the long border (2,100 miles) between Mexico and the United States. The war is between drug trafficking gangs over control of the lucrative drugs trade from Mexico to the US. In this compelling and disturbing work of reportage Vulliamy travels through the borderlands meeting some of the people affected.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546566</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Hayashi Danns and Leveque Sandrine
|title=Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing
|rating=3
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Before I can start, I should qualify that I have never been, nor tried to be, a lapdancer. Nor have I ever gone to a lapdancing club, nor ever tried to. I have no opinion on the matter, save that I can't imagine, in the world of free internet porn, paying some averagely attractive woman to wiggle her semi-nudity in the general direction of my face, and thinking it erotically arousing. So I come to this academically-designed volume on the matter with no prejudice. If only that were the case with the creators.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905570325</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen H Segal
|title=Geek Wisdom
|rating=4.5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=I am by no means a fully fledged geek, but on the Big Bang scale I'm probably more of a Leonard than a Penny. I was weaned on ''Star Trek '', chose ''Hitchhiker’s Guide... '' as my reading aloud piece for a Year 7 exam, and think it would be more than a little fun to take a trip to Comic Con. At the same time, there are gaping holes in my knowledge. My first celeb crush might have been ''Blake’s 7’s'' Villa but I've never seen a ''Batman'' film, never read a comic book, never quite understood what all the ''Star Wars'' fuss was about. If Sci Fi is a religion, then this is the book that can fill me in one the stories, the parables, the rules, as it were, of geekdom. I had to have it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1594745277</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Laurence Manley (editor)
|title=The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=The history of London is a long and storied one, and it's unsurprising that so many people have written about the capital. I've always loved the city, its history and novels and plays set within London, so was really keen to get my hands on this new volume in the Cambridge Companion series.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521722314</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby
|title=It Could Have Been Yours: The enlightened person's guide to the year's most desirable things
|rating=4
|genre=Trivia
|summary=In a world of diamond-encrusted skulls, gold-leafed iPhones and luxury yachts ten a penny, of blingy shit (or should that be shitty bling?) it's a relief to know people are still spending money on unique one-offs that are more worthwhile. The records for costliest photo, artwork, musical instrument and manuscript have all been broken in the twenty four months leading up to this book's release. Our collators have scoured the press for those and other, similarly noteworthy auctions, and found what other people paid for what you didn't know you would have wanted given the money.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846684900</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John L Locke
|title=Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=Locke's subtitle ''Why Men and Women Talk So Differently'' might lead you to think that this is just another self-help ''Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'' tome. It's not. Rather than focussing upon what we all know from experience – that men and women do not communicate very well because of some fundamental difference in their respective approach to verbal expression – the New York City University Professor of Linguistics sets out to explain WHY that might be.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521887135</amazonuk>
}}