Dee Cafari sailed into the record books here Monday by becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe single-handed in both directions. The British yachtswoman, at the helm of Aviva, arrived at the French port of Les Sables d'Olonne after 99 days at sea to take sixth in this sixth edition of the Vendee Globe. This was the former ...

KEEPING MUM by Brian Thompson Atlantic,

Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We've had Edward St Aubyn's novel Mother's Milk and few respectable books' pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragicomic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives.

Yet it is a fact that a really ...

Note: The English one of us (Brian Thompson) is an engineer with a most unusual hobby. This is a story of his somewhat accidental adventure into acoustics. In the real world, he is maintenance manager of a large English plant in the international brick manufacturing business. The American one of us (Layman Miller) is a retired acoustidan. You could say ...