Salt: A World History The proposition to create a whole book about what appears a simple and straightforward substance may seem rather daunting. Certainly, one expects that salt could provide a number of amusing or amazing anecdotes, but 500 pages worth? In Kurlansky’s defense, he manages to tell a tale more full-figured than a smattering of interesting errata, but I can’t help but feel as though there was at least 75 pages worth of fluff.
Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax' Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies! was one of my favorite books the year I read it; it was not only solid science writing, but also just lurid enough to appeal to my nascent morbidity.
When I first saw Bad Astronomy, I thought it was a new book, but in fact it’s almost ten years old; published in 2002, it is Plait’s foray into the world of popular science, and something of a companion piece to the blog of the same name he started in 1999.
1776 I read McCullough’s biography of John Adams three years ago and found it every bit as amazing as the Pulitzer committee did. In the course of describing John Adams’ life, especially his role in the Continental Congress, involved no small number of words about the Revolutionary War; however, Adams being a congressman and not a military man, the martial details of that time period were largely absent from the book.
1776 was, apparently, written as a sort of companion piece to that biography. It’s both trademark McCullough and also somehow disappointing.
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer There must be something about Dan Gardner that coerces me to read his topics in pairs. When I read Gardner’s last book, The Science of Fear, I immediately read Physics for Future Presidents as well, which had a fair amount in common.
Now Gardner’s latest book, Future Babble, is largely a sociological study, and what should I read immediately afterward but another sociology book, with no small amount of overlap. In fairness, Watts’ book ends up being the superior of the two.
Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better Several years go, I read Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear, which belongs to a genre of nonfiction I internally think of as “iconoclastic popular science”, or the “Everything you know is wrong” genre. Written for lay persons, such books purport to de[con]struct popular misconceptions about how things work, or to explain to the reader how they are being mislead, either on purpose or accidentally, by people who know better.
Other popular entrants in this genre are anything by Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics books by Levitt and Dubner. By itself, the inclusion of a book in this genre doesn’t say anything about its quality or merit; what does seem to be the case is that, either because of the subject matter or because of the various empty suits in charge of the book’s publication, the marketing and even the content of the books tend to be afflicted with a snobby snideness at best and a conspiratorial air at worst.