As a confirmed and fanatical bibliophile, the thought of using an e-reader has never been particularly attractive. They've always had a similar attraction to reading a book as a PDF on desktop or laptop. Sure, you'd do when you needed to, but it couldn't compare to the convenience, comfort and sheer pleasure of a book. And the early generation of specialist devices did little to change that view. Why spend time looking at a screen when you could look at a book?

However, Alan Jacobs in his 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction', made a good case for the Amazon Kindle as the device that changes all of that. Here clearly was a man in love with reading and with books, who could outline a case that reading with the Kindle was decidedly not like reading off another screen. It was not just the technical details about e-ink technology or the comfort of reading the Kindle screen. It was not just the ability to store hundreds of books on one device. Nor even the chance to search the text. No, what made the Kindle different, according to Jacobs, was that it provided all of the functionality of electronic devices without the distractions.

It's almost a perverse argument. The Kindle is good because it makes the things that act as distractions to reading - like surfing the web - difficult. Sure, the Kindle has got a primitive sort of web browser, but it's slow and not very functional. The screen is great for text - clear and legible - but it's black and white and less than ideal for web pages or full colour graphics. It's got lots of functionality, but the focus is on reading pure and simple.

As an argument it's not one that would be appealing to most people, but to a reader it's about as compelling as you can get. Could the Kindle really be the device that entices hard-core readers to consider an electronic device? [Continued]

In an age of increasing distraction, this book is a timely reminder of the many and varied pleasures of reading. It's a slim little volume, a rumination on the nature of reading, books and, in part, on technology. It travels light over the terrain, touching on different aspects of why we read, how we read, when to read and so on. There's something immediately engaging about the book, it draws you in and in doing so shows you what a pleasure reading can be. Like a good story, there's no blatant exposition here, just the pleasure of reading emerging naturally from the clear, friendlty and humane prose. The fact that the book (or a codex as Jacobs refers to the physical package) is so well put together and downright desirable is also a factor.

So, does Jacobs have any sage advice for those of us forever pulled towards screens and phones and gadgets and away from books? He suggests reading on Whim (spelt exactly like that). Reading for duty's sake, or for utilitarian reasons, is not the way. Reading on Whim, for the sheer enjoyment of it, for the getting lost in the text, is what he proposes.

Lest you regard Jacobs as a luddite, he offers one of the best rationale's for e-readers (specifically Amazon's Kindle), that I've read anywhere. Not just for the obvious reasons related to electronic books (portability, storage, text search etc), but because the Kindle makes things like web searching and other distractions difficult. And that, I have to say, makes perfect sense. [Continued]

It feels strange to describe a book about cancer as gripping, but there is no other way to describe Siddartha Mukherjee's Emperor Of All Maladies. Billed as a 'biography of cancer', Mukherjee's book is much more than that. It is part history of oncology, part personal journey and part exploration of the nature of the disease. Yet it manages to weave these disparate elements into a single narrative that is hard to put down. What makes it all the more stunning is that Mukherjee is a medic, but he writes with the fluid ease of the best of today's science writers.

The historical scope takes us from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks through to the present day. For much of that period cancer was a disease that was often left untreated - there really was nothing that could be done. With no modern understanding of cells and genes, this mysterious and deadly disease was ascribed to black bile or bad humours or supernatural origins.

Later, as our understanding increased (slowly, in fits and starts, and there is still so much we don't know), so too did the first treatments. For a long time the emphasis in treating solid tumours was surgery - and here we learn about feats of surgical skill and endurance that stripped away the disease but often at huge cost to the patient. For a time the treatment of choice for breast cancer was radical surgery - not just the removal of the breast, but strings of lymph nodes, parts of the lung, ribs, shoulder blades. Surgeons cut out more and more in order to stop the disease recurring. But often it did, even after the most extreme surgeries imaginable. Without an understanding of how the disease spread - in other words the process of metastasis - surgeons were at a loss to understand why these most extreme operations would ultimately fail.

Chemotherapy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Mukherjee devotes a good chunk of his book to one of the driving forces of this innovation: Dr Sidney Farber. [Continued]

Donna Laframboise, author of The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert, responds to questions on the controversies surrounding her book, the responses to it and the politics of climate change. [Continued]

Much discussion of climate change revolves around appeals to authority. This is inevitable, as most people don't have the time, energy or knowledge to look into the science in any great detail. And, for many, there can be no greater authority than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Taken at face value, the IPCC ought to be the final authority, after all, its work is performed by thousands of the world's top scientists, reviewing the peer reviewed literature in detail and producing a synthesis of what we know about the climate and how it's changing. The IPCC is quoted reverently by the media, politicians and activists alike. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, it's a child of the United Nations, and therefore of the world as a whole.

Really, what kind of person can dispute these facts? Well, Donna Laframboise for one. She is a journalist, feminist and civil libertarian. Not exactly the 'white male conservative' who is assumed by the media to be the typical 'climate change denier'. First online, and now in this book, she has subjected the IPCC to the critical scrutiny that is should always have received. And what she, and a small group of volunteers who gathered around her, discovered shows that the IPCC is a body that is fatally flawed and is probably beyond redemption.

The starting point is a key claim made both by the IPCC and faithfully parroted by a compliant media - that it only relies on peer reviewed literature when drawing up its reports. Laframboise and her group of unpaid volunteers took on the job of following up all of the thousands of references in the 3000+ pages of the IPCC assessment reports. What they discovered was there were thousands of references to non-peer reviewed literature - to newspaper and magazine articles, reports from bodies such as the WWF and more. And not just a few, in some places over 40% of the references were to so-called 'grey literature'. [Continued]

Denis Gingras, co-author of Foods to Fight Cancer, responds to questions on the food, life-style and the role of diet in preventing and treating cancer [Continued]

Christopher Booker, co-author of Scared To Death, responds to questions on global warming, health scares, the mass media and responses to his book in this interview with LondonBookReview.com [Continued]

Future Babble by Dan Gardner; Integrative Oncology by Donald Abrams and Andrew Weil…