Five Days In November – Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin, 2013 ★★★★

So Close and Yet So Far

Like a few professional athletes and pretty much nobody else I know of, Clint Hill’s worst day at work unfolded before an audience of millions and echoes across posterity.

No wonder he waited so long to write about it.

“Could I have reacted faster?” he wonders. “Run faster? For the rest of my life I will live with the overwhelming guilt that I was unable to get there in time.”

High Stakes – Dick Francis, 1975 ★★½

Hard-Charging Mystery Hangs on at the Turn

If you know Dick Francis already and want more of his mystery fiction, here’s another gripping if formulaic excursion into the underside of life, connected in this case rather firmly to Francis’s home turf, the world of horse-racing.

If you are a Francis novice, High Stakes isn’t exactly the type to make you a fan.

A feeling of being run through the motions hangs over this crime novel, not unlike finding yourself inside one of the wheel-driven devices with which, we come to discover, the main character has made himself a mint.

Life On Earth – David Attenborough, 1979 ★★★★

Mother Nature Displays Her Charms

Phylum-hopping from microbes to coral reefs to orangutans, David Attenborough offers what may well be one of the most engaging tours ever taken of the natural world in this, a companion volume to his celebrated BBC series. The book details the evolutionary path of all earthly life, from prehistoric plants to present-day man.

Do you know that orchids may attract pollen-carrying insects by impersonating sex partners, or even carrion?

That a frog chorus can fill a swamp with a greater diversity of sound than one would get in a concert hall?

That a shearwater bird was taken from Wales to Boston and managed to fly itself back home?