One of the longest-running programmes on radio in the UK is a thing called Desert Island Discs, where the guest picks eight records (remember them?) that would be the eight they’d be happy to be stuck on a desert island with. In addition to the vinyl, you get to pick a book to be your companion on the island with for your years of solitude – The Bible and The Complete Works of Shakespeare are already there, to save you the bother (perhaps left by a previous inhabitant?).
Well, now I know. This is my Desert Island Book. It is an astonishing work, which works through a deceptively simple Buddhist text (the Satipatthana Sutta), using its discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness as a map to many many teachings and approaches to meditation. The depth and wisdom is extraordinary, and although it’s not necessarily going to be easy for a beginner, it has pretty much everything in there.
Think of it as a kit: all the parts are there, all clearly labelled. You just have to do the work of putting them together, finding which bit is going to solve the problem you’re currently facing, and applying it in the right way. There is broad guidance, but basically everyone is going to need to find their own path, because in all honesty we are all going to hit different sets of problems in different orders. But it’s all in there.
Don’t pick this up as your introduction to meditation – but if you want to take your practice further than the app you bought yourself on January 1st last year and stopped using regularly by about March, and if you’re prepared to do the work, then this is a truly profound guide for you. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Three and a half stars, really. There’s a lot to commend here; a very fluent writer, grappling with finding words to describe the indescribable, his own personal experience of depression and anxiety. It has a lot of very short chapters – most are only a page or two – and the narrative slowly emerges. It’s good in many ways, and clearly well regarded by those who have suffered in this way.
I have to say that personally, I struggled at times with it. It was too choppy, too all over the place in narrative thread. And it never really lived up to the title – the reason to stay alive is that this episode would pass, and you might learn from it. True for acute anxiety and depression, but not for an overall existential angst.
I’m not a particular sufferer, but I know some who are, and I fear this would not be a useful book for them. I feel bad about this, as the book is so heartfelt, but this is what I felt. Sorry mate.
Entertaining writing and interesting characters, all set in an alternate modern-day London where ghosts and ghouls started appearing to everyday folks in the 1990s, and society is still making adjustments to this new reality.
The hero, Felix Castor, a self-employed exorcist, is suitably flawed – very much in the vein of gumshoe private eyes of old. His slow change of approach towards his job throughout the book was a neat story arc, with him thinking more about ghosts and what the really are, and the implications for his job as he’s been doing it.
Meantime, Pen, his landlady-slash-support has a great backstory, hinted at rather than thrown open, so I’m sure we’ll see more of that in the future. And the appearance at the end of a new apprentice for Felix was a great setup for the next in the series.
The writing throughout was strong, with enough intelligent asides and references to make it a definite step above some others in the genre. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will look out for others in the series, so a good four-star book for me.
Loved this book. This contained everything I could ask for in popular science: a very engaging prose style and a bunch of interesting new material about topics that I love, all woven into a compelling narrative across a very broad canvas illustrated in depth with characterful anecdotes and curious asides. Even topics where I thought I was already well-informed were brought into a new light.
Gleick starts with the earliest forms of non-verbal communication – how writing evolved, and how that may in itself have catalyzed changes in the way humans actually think. He discusses communication over distances by a great discussion of talking drums, and that alone was practically worth the price of admission. I had no idea how they actually worked, and the setup of how they mimic the rising and falling tones of the tonal tribal languages, but need much more florid phrases to disambiguate what they are saying because they have tone alone to work with, was brilliant.
Next, we are introduced to the very first dictionaries, and what an odd thing they are if you’ve never seen one. Alphabetical order, for example, is an alien concept that we just take for granted – just think how pictographic languages might (not) work with that. And which new words deserve to be included? Again, not obvious concepts.
From here we move to the core concepts of numbers, via Charles Babbage and his engines of computation. This was familiar territory to me, but still I found new insights and interest, not insignificantly down to just the sheer depth of the material being presented. Once we have numbers, we get to codes, and from there to how you might code a language – Samuel Morse makes a great appearance here.
Now comes the more mathematical chapters, as Claude Shannon tries to work out what information actually is, driven by the desire of his employers (Bell corporation) to cram more information, in the form of morse, or other, coded language down a noisy channel. This expands into a much broader section that’s effectively about mathematics as a language, which touches on Godel’s incompleteness theorem and builds up towards Maxwell’s demon and how information and energy are in some intriguing mathematical ways directly interchangeable.
I’ve seen all of this before, and what worries me still is that Shannon’s definition of information doesn’t correspond very well to our natural, every-day understanding of information. This means that the mapping back from conclusions drawn from information theory back to our every-day world may give us some warped conclusions. The concept of logical depth, from Charles Bennett, fits this more closely, and gets a brief mention at the end of these chapters, but could have done with more coverage for me.
No modern book about information can avoid touching on Dawkins’ concept of the meme, and Gleick covers this in the concluding chapters. He builds from DNA as a code up to this, and here I might criticise his lack of any discussion of epigenetic effects: we now know that DNA isn’t simply the code for life, but that there are a whole number of other things that affect for example what parts of the genome are expressed, and these often come from outside of the chromosomes themselves. Examples abound, but include the way in which many reptiles will grow out of an egg as one gender or another depending on the temperature of incubation, or how a regular bee will become a queen bee if fed the right chemicals (in the form of royal jelly). None of this was discussed, but it could have been incorporated – the person that reads a text gets different meanings depending on what it understands about the world already, after all.
Overall my criticisms are minor in the face of a great book – five stars for sure, and one to keep for a re-read another day!
I found this to be a deeply researched, thoughtful, beautiful insight into the lived experience and ecosystems of ten different species of seabirds. And simultaneously, a heart-wrenching, terrifying, glimpse into the impact of the human world on their breeding and feeding grounds, their populations and their individual lives.
Early on, Adam Nicolson introduces the concept of “umwelt”, created by Joakob von Uexkull after reading Kant and his idea that our minds shape the world we perceive:
The German means ‘surrounding world’, but more largely, as primatologist Frans de Waal has described it, Uexkull had in mind a vision of the animal’s ‘self-centred subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds’. Each species lives in its own unique sensory universe, to which we may be partially or wholly blind, and so we must not speak of animal ‘cognition’ or animal ‘intelligence’, but in the plural of ‘cognitions’ and ‘intelligences’. Each animal’s ‘meaning-world’ cannot be understood on any terms except its own.
This concept of umwelt drives the rest of the book. In ten chapters, Nicolson tries to show us the meaning-world of birds from Fulmars to Gannets and Albatrosses. It’s a beautiful, beautiful, book, with an important message. Quite how we individually can help with these large-scale coordination problems is a challenge that besets the modern age, as we drive in our ton-and-a-half of steel’s worth of cars, burning irreplaceable fuels, to trendy cafes where we sip eco-friendly lattes (made with almond milk – using ten times the water of dairy milk to farm – and rare breed coffee, farmed on the former habitat of we-care-not-what animals), congratulating ourselves that we no longer use a plastic straw to sip through. Whatever we are doing, it’s clear it’s too little, and may well be too late.
Three and a half stars, really. This book is a bit of a classic, perhaps now showing its age, as it explores the boundaries of what it is to be human by telling the story of the pilot and his increasingly autonomous AI-managed fighter plane, in a war against an unseen alien foe.
Although there were some enjoyable moments, I fear either I missed the point, or the point was so obvious at to be not very interesting (humans – good but flawed; AI – bad but perfect, until it becomes more like a human and discovers the value of flaws).
After the loveliness that was Harold Fry and his adventures, this was always going to be risky: it’s a re-telling of the story from the other end, that of Queenie Hennessy. Sadly, for me, this didn’t quite come off. It felt to me as if the plot was a little too thin, stretched out too far, and at times I found myself speed-reading to get to the next point. It wasn’t bad – the writing is solid, the characters solid if a little one-dimensional at times – but in the end there just wasn’t enough going on to hold my attention. I wanted to like it, and started to read with a lot of goodwill, and that kept me going through. Any remaining, sadly, was blown spectacularly in the last few pages.
I have to say, although I found it hard to get started, I really enjoyed this book. It explores two quite different intelligent alien species, and their interactions with humans. One species (the Ilmataran) is much less advanced than us, the other (the Sholen) somewhat more so. Together with the setting of the story – in a liquid-water ocean below the mile-thick ice layer on a moon around a gas giant – the book sets out to explore the interactions between them. They are the characters, really, rather than the human participants, with the interactions between them driving the plot forward.
Of course, as with all good fiction, it’s all just a veneer over humanity and our predilections:
“While war for love is inspiring in legends and epic poems, we must be governed by cynical pragmatism.”
Or even:
“Well, yeah, but the Russian Navy didn’t order you to hide out in the ocean of Ilmatar waging war on a bunch of aliens.” Josef didn’t answer. “They did?” “Was given contingency plans,” said Josef at last.
At times the book was a little sparsely written – it tended towards the short, declarative, sentence. But this was in keeping with the characters (the different species) being presented, and as the plot developed, the whole thing was very successfully driven forward by this.
Overall, an interesting and well put together interaction between these different elements.
This is an amazingly comprehensive introduction to using your telescope with either a DSLR camera or a specialist astronomy camera for taking pictures of the night sky – specifically stars, galaxies and nebulae, rather than planets. It gives a thorough grounding on the theory, and follows it up with very helpful walkthroughs of processing the images you have taken with either Photoshop or PixInsight (with much of the advice probably working for other photography packages out there). Although the theory can get quite deep, even with my limited understanding it works pretty well, with each chapter starting with the straightforward stuff, and then diving pretty deep. I found myself skipping a few sections the first time through, and returning to them later when I needed their advice, and when I knew a little more to make them understandable!
I’ve been working my way through it for a few weeks now, and have succeeded in using its advice to produce some quite acceptable (for me!) photos of a few of the familiar objects out there. So I couldn’t be more pleased. Five (very beautifully imaged) stars.
Just to add to this, a couple of years later – I still refer to this book pretty much every time I am processing astrophotography. As PixInsight continues to evolve, I’m sure it will fall a little behind, but it’s holding up very well in 2020, at least.
It’s hard to be curmudgeonly when reviewing a book that anticipates your potential Christmas grumpiness and cleverly unpicks the threads of what you think of as Christmas, and takes you through their delightful origins. In the end are laid bare not such mysterious matters as the story behind Santa’s reindeer, why we eat so much at Christmas, and when Christmas actually is in the year. The tone is light but scholarly, with some very funny asides and lots of read-out-loud-and-annoy-others moments. An excellent stocking filler (which is also explained therein).
