All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps by Dave Isay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a charming collection of real-life conversations between two people about what matters most in their life. Each chapter is a few pages long, distilling down a 45 minute conversation to its essence. All are stories of love, from the joy of newfound love to the happiness of a long life together, with the utter desolation of loss in the mix as well. Beautiful, and true.
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a fascinating book! Michael Brooks surveys thirteen areas of enquiry – some narrow and deeply embedded in science, such as the search for dark matter and dark energy, others already discarded by mainstream science but still refusing to completely lie down and die, such as cold fusion and homeopathy, and a few that are broader and don’t naturally fit into a single narrow field of study, like sex, death and free will.
He looks at where we are in investigating them, and then pokes and prods at the challenging questions, and the possible explanations. Why do most complex living things die, for example? Not all do, and it’s possible to significantly extend lifespans, in some cases apparently indefinitely, via mechanisms such as gene editing. So why would it be there in the first place? If genes just wanted to propagate themselves, then surely best to do it from the existing host, rather than risk killing the existing host and chancing that there are enough progeny out there to pass on the genes themselves?
Other questions explore areas that just appear to have been made up by science to create convenient explanations for things. Dark matter and dark energy are like this. From the way stars rotate around the centres of a galaxy, we can use the laws of gravity as we understand them to estimate the total mass in the galaxy. And, based on what we see, there isn’t nearly enough visible mass there. Hence the need for additional dark matter. But we can’t detect it in any wavelength. Which means it must have very specific properties, in order to remain hidden. And we don’t have any explanation for the existence of such matter. So maybe it’s our understanding of the laws of gravity that’s wrong? Right now, we simply don’t know!
And so on, across thirteen fields of such broad range that it’s hard not to be captured by many of them. Underlying them all is the theme that science as a field finds it hard to change its mind. In part, this is a very good thing: any new explanation can’t discard all the data accumulated so far, it must explain all that we already know, plus these additional observations that are currently unexplained. And that’s a very hard test. But this is also about how scientists are people, and people don’t like to have their world models turned upside down. So it’s a book about how we practice science itself, as much as about these particular mysteries.
I enjoyed it very much. Well written, with some mind-spinning thoughts in it. Many paper books that I read get released back into the wild after their first read, as perhaps interesting but not worthy of a re-visit. This one, I shall be keeping, and opening up on a winter’s evening for a quick browse, and a follow-up online to see where we are on some of these mysteries.
Which Cult Should I Join?: A Choose-Your-Own Guidebook for the Spiritually Bereft by Jo Stewart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Entertaining tour of some of the weird and wacky cults out there, laid out in the form of one of those “write your own adventure” books from my youth. By answering a series of questions, you will find the cult most “appropriate” for you – or that’s the joke. Each cult is described in a page or so, which clearly barely does justice to some of the odd-ball beliefs out there, but it’s enough to whet your appetite for further study, should you so choose.
Of course what you’ll likely end up doing is playing with your answers to see where they lead, to find the kind of cult that would suit a rifle-toting believer in satan and his ways who also likes heavy rock music, or whatever takes your fancy. And of course you could always do what I ended up doing, which is reading it all from the beginning.
All in all, a well-written series of brief accounts of the stranger fringes of our world, well worth making a present of to someone you know – so long as you get to play along as well.
Four Colours Suffice: How The Map Problem Was Solved by Robin J. Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a clear and entertaining account of the long history of the attempts to provr four colour theorem – that any map on can be coloured with at most four colour, such that no countries with a common border have the same colour. Although there are lots of interesting characters and asides, this is not a book for the mathematically faint of heart: in order to understand the approach that finally proved the conjecture, Robin Wilson takes you pretty far into the dense woods. If you enjoy following along, and are prepared (as I was) to skim over the more complex parts, you will still come away with a good appreciation of how it happened. You will also perhaps understand why many mathematicians at the time were skeptical about the proof: it needed over 1000 hours of computer time to complete the proof, and the approach is too complex to check by hand. Does that count as a “proof”? Nowadays, when computers are routinely used by mathematicians to check their own work, people would have fewer doubts, but in the 1970s, many felt this to be a real issue.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
An extraordinarily moving, simple, book, written with soul-piercing clarity. Harold Fry is an everyman, recently retired from working for 45 years in a small brewery. He receives a letter from an old colleague, and sets off, journeying in the physical world by foot up through the backbone of England, while he simultaneously works his way through an accumulated lifetime’s worth of psychic pain. Each reflects back upon the other, in a multi-faceted gem that compelled me to keep reading. The prose is simple and powerful, while the poignancy and power and emotional turmoil meant that the small pile of tissues beside me grew ever larger over the last third of the book.
Honestly, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of books I’ve read that moved me this much, that get so much power and charge into so few words. Astonishing. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Rating: 2 star (!)
This was a tough review for me: I mean, Richard Feynman?! The man is a god, really, plus the whole Nobel Prize thing, who am I to criticise? Unfortunately I think this book is showing its age, especially in the writing style. It’s more or less a transcription of Feynman speaking his lectures, as captured by the BBC in the 1960s, and unfortunately that doesn’t translate terribly well into a writing style.
It’s also starting a bunch of physics from (nearly) the beginning, which means that for me, it didn’t tell me anything terribly new.
On the other hand, it does give a very different perspective on things like Newton’s theory of gravity, which you might not see in many other places. I enjoyed also his complete transparency about how physics, and science in general, is done: you make bold predictions about things in completely new spaces, you test them out, then if they fail you guess at the form of new laws that might explain them. And he’s quite clear about the guessing part: great scientists are great guessers. Which makes Prof. Feynman a guesser of interstellar proportions, I think. A true polymath genius, that man. So I feel bad about the 2 stars, but I’m reviewing the book, not the man!
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very intriguing idea, clearly thought through, with great examples
I loved the core idea here – that actually we don’t know our true motives for many of the things we do, and that our brains are in fact set up so that this ignorance is reinforced. There are some great examples, small and large, of habits (at one end) and entire economic or social institutions at the other end, that illustrated these points. A!though the authors seemed concerned that readers would find some of the examples hard to swallow and too hard to believe, I found them all entire too credible. So perhaps for me the book’s only failing was in not being hard hitting enough, rather than going too far. Overall though an excellent read, with many Kindle highlights created.
Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Delightful and excellent science-centric fun
Charming book from Andy Weir here. As with The Martian, chock-full of science which is integral to the plot, and very entertaining. One could argue that Jazz, the hero, was too wildly capable and smart for someone that age, but I’m not going to complain, because it made for a very entertaining story, and honestly, that’s what I was there for.
Apex by Ramez Naam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I loved Nexus and I though Crux was good, but I really struggled with this, the third in the trilogy. I felt it took a long time to get going,and in the end it played out 400 pages of plot across 650 pages of book.
FDR by Jean Edward Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an extraordinary book: not only a work of immense scholarship (with 150+ pages of footnotes and 35 pages of bibliography), it is also the immensely readable tale of one of the most remarkable and influential figures of the 20th century. I was gripped with every page, learning a huge amount not only about FDR himself, but also the period of American history across the two world wars, as well as gaining something of an insight into how American politics actually works. Everything from the impact and true depth of the Depression to gripping accounts of nomination convenient floor fights, to behind the scenes views of his meetings with Churchill and Stalin. Outstanding!