Nicholas Bourbaki was one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, publishing celebrated volumes about the structure and foundations of mathematics. And yet he never existed. "Bourbaki" was the pseudonymous invention of a group of French mathematicians who gathered regularly from the years before the second world war to conduct anarchic, free-wheeling conversations about the nature of maths. Aczel illuminates well how the group directly inspired the "structuralism" in the anthropology of Claude L

Imagine that tomorrow you're going to spend the day standing on a boulder whirling through space, a sphere with water clinging improbably to its surface. If you're in Lima, you'll be moving almost twice as fast as your cousin in Anchorage. You'll be moving at an impossible speed around a dazzling ball of fire, like an out-of-control chariot driver destined for death. In fact, you will die some day or night, from life itself, but hopefully not tomorrow, and hopefully not before you've read Michael Sims' Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination. Sims, a great poet and storyteller, escorts his readers through the most ordinary, mundane, unexplored and magical of terrains -- literally, a journey through the everyday. Sims has a rare gift for showing the most taken-for-granted basics of human life as radical, mystical and strange. In his award-winning Adam's Navel: The Weird and Wonderful Story of the Human Body, he did it with basic anatomy -- after reading and rereading that book, I'll never experience my skin, heart or lungs the same way again. In Apollo's Fire, he turns his X-ray gaze to a single day on earth from morning to night.