When I first picked up this book, I wondered how the author, Sharman Apt Russell, a middle-aged American academic, could subtitle it "an unnatural history". Surely hunger is pretty much the most natural thing in the world. All animals, ourselves included, are driven by hunger every day of our lives. If we are vital enough to stave it off, we might pass on our genes; if not, our failings die [...]

When I was a binger, I always approached the Christmas period with trepidation. During the rest of the year, I binged on food, and alcohol, and drugs. I hated it, and I hated myself for doing it. The only solace was a brief moment every so often, a small glimmer of hope that, somehow, this might be the day, or possibly the week, when everything changed. Of course, it almost [...]

There are a lot of excellent things in Niall Murtagh's book about being a blue-eyed, brown-haired worker in a Japanese corporation full of people who are not blue-eyed or brown-haired. On the cover, we see Murtagh's European face, set in what appears to be a sea of Japanese faces. He is different. This is a book about what it feels like to work in a culture you don't quite understand [...]

Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who prefers to be called Sir Alfred Mehran, is the man who has lived on a bench in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport since 1988. In this book, a ghost-written account, he tells us about his life. At first, when he began living at the airport, his days were stultifyingly dull - in the mornings, he would eat fast food from an airport Burger [...]

This terrific book, which had me gripped from the start and which I buzzed through in a few happy hours, is about the land speed record - in other words, about men and vehicles. The vehicles are strange and scary - huge, ugly constructions, engine-heavy, uncomfortable, terrifically dangerous. If anything, though, the men are even stranger and scarier. They are obsessive, compulsive, deeply flawed, with self-destructive tendencies. There is a [...]

When I saw the cover of this book, which depicts various scenes from 6 May 1954, the day Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, I was excited. There's a picture of Bannister, looking shattered, just before he crosses the finishing line. There's another picture, taken after the race, of Bannister and his two pacemakers, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway. What was that about? I had always wondered exactly why he [...]

This is a book about the world's best-known brand, and it tells you pretty much what you'd expect to hear - that people drink Coca-Cola not because of the taste, but because it's Coca-Cola. The author, Constance Hays, a journalist at the New York Times, does not spend much time telling us about what's in the bottle, even though the secret formula these days is "little more than a marketing [...]

Tim Guest's mother was one of the "Orange People" - a follower of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At a low ebb one day in the late 1970s, she listened to one of Bhagwan's tapes, on the cover of which was the invitation, "Surrender to me, and I will transform you." Guest himself was five years old. His mother took Bhagwan's advice. She surrendered, and spent most of the [...]

Mary Roach sets out to discover what happens to bodies after people die. Some bodies are buried and some are cremated, after they have been washed, embalmed and dressed in their most flattering clothes. But all sorts of other, more interesting, things happen to dead bodies. They are cut open and "harvested" for their organs. They are sliced into pieces and studied by anatomists. Some are put into cars and [...]

If you're put off by the £10 price tag on this little book, don't be; it's terrific. On one level, it's about the author's fascination with a tennis player. But it's much more than this; it's a book about how the world has changed in our lifetime. John McEnroe was a tennis player with a difference - one who wanted to express his feelings. At first, he was hated, and [...]