Neil Hopcroft

I have something of a soft spot for Shaun Hutson, his writing style is utterly disposable, theres no depth to any of his characters or stories, but somehow I still find it all rather compelling. Its a long time since I read any of his books. This sees him more in a crime thriller genre […]

“A design for living in the digital age” This is now quite an old book – a lot of it is still pertinant but I wish I’d read it ten years ago. Dyson is clearly someone who gets it, she understood a lot of the potential of the internet way before most people out there. […]

This is a fairly generic ‘management improvement book’, they all claim they can help you improve the way you do things or the way you think about things. They mostly just contain the same dross wrapped up in different ways. This is no different, it concentrates on problem identification and solution, but theres no new […]

My expectation, when selecting this book, was that I would be reading another account of the life of a drugged out hippy. This is very far from what it contains. Its a little oddly laid out, with two parallel stories in the first half, Leary as a troublemaker in the army and his joining Harvard […]

Sarah is the Irish schoolgirl who shot to fame in 1999 when she created a new crypto algorithm. The algorithm has since been attacked to the point where it is not considered useful. The book is about her exploration of number theory, what happened when she worked with Baltimore, the crypto company, and where that […]

“The secret history of mind control” This is an interesting book, it works its way through a number of attempts at mind control. It covers truth drugs, hypnosis, torture, subliminal advertising and religion. There is a lot of good detail about the background of some of the experiments done by the CIA into finding truth […]

“100 secret strategies for investing” This is a kind of “Being Richard Farley for Dummies” book, it describes who he is and how he does the things he does. But for all that its actually quite an interesting read. He has split his thoughts up into 10 sets of 10 ‘secrets’, some of which are […]

Heavy. Who should read this book? Someone with strong arms. (I’m going to put this one back on the shelf until I’ve built up a bit more muscle in my arms…proper review another time)

“A critical romp through the terribly libertarian world of high tech” I don’t know what happened to Paulina, but she seems to have suffered somehow at the hands of a someone she thinks represents all techno-libertarians. This book describes the views of a small subset of people who have managed to get the wrong end […]

There was an April Fool report going around a couple of years back that Charlie Stross had transcended. Reading this book you can understand why. Its not particularly well written, in a formal literature sense, but it is full of people, and examines the clash of two very different civilisations. Both significantly advanced from our […]