Phil Shannon

"May I wish Mr Kevin Andrews a long and excruciatingly painful life" was the response of a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald at the federal parliament's passing of a bill by then Liberal Party backbencher Kevin Andrews, which overturned the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia legislation in 1997.

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and his Backyard Nuclear ReactorBy Ken SilversteinFourth Estate, 2004$29.95 (pb) David Hahn could have been taken for a typical US teenager in the 1990s. He loved driving

Thirty per cent of the US working class earn less than US$8 per hour and Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to know how these "working poor" managed to survive.

Only one bowler has ever knocked the bat out of the hands of Don Bradman, cricket's greatest batter: Eddie Gilbert. Only 15 bowlers have ever dismissed Bradman without a run to his name. Eddie Gilbert was one of them. Yet, whilst Bradman played test cricket for Australia for two decades, Gilbert was never selected to play at the sport's highest level.

Awestruck by the power of the atomic bomb during its test bombing in the New Mexico desert, J Robert Oppenheimer nevertheless set the coordinates for the first atomic bombs to be used in war, to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later, writes Phil Shannon.