Human beings are becoming thirstier by the day, consuming five times the amount of water today than 40 years ago. The average American consumes on an average 200 gallons per day, while a rural Kenyan might just use 1.3. Most people in the world would use no more than 13 gallons per day. In other words, Americans consume between 10 and 100 times the amount of water consumed by other inhabitants of the globe. Someone has even bothered to calculate the bizarre fact that if all the 20 million waterbeds in the United States were emptied, they would produce enough water to sustain a village in India for more than a year, says Subir Ghosh

An autobiographical sojourn of a philosopher to explain his moorings in philosophy is fraught with its intrinsic perils - that of becoming a self-indulgent, subjective rambling of personal notions and prejudices. For those brought up on Bertrand Russel's "History of Philosophy" or Will Durant's "The Story of "Philosophy" or, for that matter, T.Z. Lavine's "From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest", this volume is sure to come as a let-down, writes Subir Ghosh

After 30 years of reporting on France for Reuters and The Economist and marriage to a Frenchwoman, Jonathan Fenby comes out with an informative, insightful and critical study of France, his "home, away from home". Fenby, now the editor of South China Morning Post, weaves reportage, anecdotes and analyses into a fascinating presentation of contemporary France, says Subir Ghosh

Science historian and presenter of the popular television series Connections, James Burke, shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill, writes Subir Ghosh

The fun is in the pun when the limericks from a corporate communications executive, apprehensive as he is of the steady erosion of humour from people's lives, attempt to liven up things just a bit, says Subir Ghosh

The entries themselves range from short definitions of concepts to longer articles on more complex topics, such as morphogenesis (the idea that all writing can be traced back to a single system), orthographic reform, and dyslexia. Over 400 figures and 1,600 tables illustrate not only the world's orthographies but also such things as the Mormon alphabet, the elements comprising Mayan logograms (written signs representing whole words), and Babylonian clay tablets, says Amazon.com