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This year, as last, an American has carried off the premier prize for
a science book. Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
beat 57 other entrants for the £10 000 COPUS prize, sponsored by
Rhone-Poulenc.

The junior prize was shared by The Amazing Voyage of the Cucumber Sandwich
by Peter Rowan and David Burnie’s How Nature Works. Dinosaur, by David Norman,
in the junior category, ended up with a special commendation as a family
book because it ‘deserved recognition across boundaries’.

These awards pale a little in the face of the advance offered to George
Smoot. According to The Bookseller, the US publisher Little, Brown has offered
Smoot £200 000 for his account of the discovery of the ripples from
the big bang in a book to be called Wrinkles in Time.