From Publishers Weekly
Exhaustingly extensive and well-researched, this study of developments in contemporary weapons technology evinces a gee-whiz love of military widgets. It also contains journalist Hambling's desire to explore the murkily overlapping scientific, military and corporate worlds. The result is a book that is for short stretches a breezy guide to everything from vortex cannons to tasers, and everyone from Tesla to Turing. Hambling describes complex procedures and devices in a lucid, uncondescending way, and a reader seeking a quick description of, say, how a rocket plane works or what an E-bomb is need look no further. But the scale and scope of the book indicate an ambition to be something other than a supplementary reference to the novels of Tom Clancy and the press briefings of Donald Rumsfeld. Hambling's underlying thesis is that advances in military technology eventually benefit civilian life (e.g., the Internet), and that the domestic technologies and business opportunities of the future, like nanotechnology, are already to be found in today's military hardware. While gently and inconclusively touched on, the moral implications of this are never really explored in any depth, and the military-industrial complex is seen mostly as an ethically neutral dispenser of fascinatingly nasty devices. The lack of broader context, along with a wearyingly episodic structure, create frustrating limits. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Sillitoe enjoys high regard in British fiction, particularly for his classic long short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," about a young man in reform school who competes in a long-distance race and, as he does so, what his thoughts are on victory and "reform." Of course, that story appears in this compendium of the author's best short fiction to date, drawn from five previous collections. Critical consensus is that despite such effective novels as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Sillitoe expresses himself best in the short form. The "interiorness" of "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" is characteristic of most of his stories. For instance, "The Sniper" offers a disturbing portrait of an old man's haunted mind. Sillitoe's stories often showcase characters whose reality is not quite in sync with how others view reality, as in the stunning story "Uncle Earnest," in which a lonely man befriends a schoolgirl and sustains quite a shock when confronted with other people's lurid interpretation of his motives. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
With his 1959 novella The Loneliness of the Long- Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe brought a poetic new voice to working-class England. Certainly no stranger to the harsh realities of blue-collar life himself, Sillitoe was born one of five children to a poor Nottingham factory family. He left school at age fourteen to find work in the very factories from which his father found himself unemployed, and began his writing career during a stint in the Royal Air Force. With the publication of Saturday Night Sunday Morning in 1958 and the subsequent arrival of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner a year later, Sillitoe quickly established himself as a standout in England's embittered yet immensely talented "Angry Young Men" school of writers, which included, among others, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne. However, like Amis, Sillitoe moved beyond the anger of his youth and compiled an impressively diverse array of work. New and Collected Stories brings together more than forty pieces of short fiction, encompassing Sillitoe's entire career, and includes several previously unpublished stories. It is an essential and comprehensive collection from an often-overlooked gem in the canon of modern fiction and an abiding literary voice for working-class Britain.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

New and Collected Stories brings together more than forty pieces of short fiction, encompassing Alan Sillitoe's entire career, and includes several previously unpublished stories. It is an essential collection from an often-overlooked gem in the canon of modern fiction and an abiding literary voice for working-class Britain.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Exhaustingly extensive and well-researched, this study of developments in contemporary weapons technology evinces a gee-whiz love of military widgets. It also contains journalist Hambling's desire to explore the murkily overlapping scientific, military and corporate worlds. The result is a book that is for short stretches a breezy guide to everything from vortex cannons to tasers, and everyone from Tesla to Turing. Hambling describes complex procedures and devices in a lucid, uncondescending way, and a reader seeking a quick description of, say, how a rocket plane works or what an E-bomb is need look no further. But the scale and scope of the book indicate an ambition to be something other than a supplementary reference to the novels of Tom Clancy and the press briefings of Donald Rumsfeld. Hambling's underlying thesis is that advances in military technology eventually benefit civilian life (e.g., the Internet), and that the domestic technologies and business opportunities of the future, like nanotechnology, are already to be found in today's military hardware. While gently and inconclusively touched on, the moral implications of this are never really explored in any depth, and the military-industrial complex is seen mostly as an ethically neutral dispenser of fascinatingly nasty devices. The lack of broader context, along with a wearyingly episodic structure, create frustrating limits. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Nathaniel Gye lectures on parapsychology at Cambridge University but doesn't necessarily believe in a spirit world. When the widow of a dead security guard (and former university employee) wrongly accused of stealing a fabulous Renaissance painting asks him to attend a s ance, Nathaniel is understandably reluctant. But the voice of the accused provides clues to the theft and debunks his alleged suicide. Only later does Gye investigate, incurring the wrath of an Italian mobster and uncovering a devious scam. A clever plot full of artful dodging, thwarted seduction, and masterly illusion: for all collections. A Cambridge graduate, Wilson is the author of over 50 books and lives in England. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews