This is a worthy successor to the first two in the Millennium trilogy, and a gripping conclusion to the various storylines. It took me about 50 pages to get back into the plot and remember what had happened to the main characters, but the author does a good job of leading you through this, building the scaffold around you where the action will unfold. Plot is gripping, as I say, and my wife said when I was still 100 pages from the end that she was looking forward to me finishing, and her getting her husband back!
Tone is similar to the previous two stories, in that the style is slightly dry and stepped back. That works well with Salander’s character, and to a certain extent also with Blomkvist, but less so I felt with some of the more emotionally aware characters such as his sister, and the leading police officers.
Overall – very well done, and even at 750 pages, never a dull moment.
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.
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.
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.
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!
