Nonfiction Book Reviews

Earth: The Biography by Iain Stewart and John Lynch was intellectually stimulating.  I know that sounds boring, but just stick with me here.

I had it sitting on my bookshelf for forever (I won’t tell you how long because my boss at work reads this blog sometimes, but believe me, it was a while) and I decided that I was going to clear off all of the books on that shelf that have been there too long.  A clean start with the New Years, and all that.

Boy am I glad I did.  I love it when I read a book, and walk away having a better understanding of how the universe as a whole works.  I knew, in a fuzzy sort of way, that nature is intricately intertwined, and that the world is one giant balancing act, but I don’t think I truly understood it until I read this book.

I think the best part of this book is how it makes the connections between various sciences.  It isn’t just about space, or the beginning of life, or the ocean, or volcanoes, or hurricanes, it’s about all of this and more.  It’s like the joke we’ve all heard a million times, about the blind men who were each trying to describe an elephant, but were only describing the part that they themselves could feel.  Although each blind man was technically getting it right, it’s only when you combine the trunk with the tail, ears, legs, and body that you actually know what an elephant looks like.

I feel like I’ve been learning about each individual part of this world, without being able to “see the big picture.”  Earth: The Biography has shown me the big picture.

This book becomes a grand slam when you add in the beautiful pictures and great writing style.  I was never bored nor lost even once while reading, which you have to admit is quite the feat, considering I am not a geologist (nor do I play one on TV).

Here’s a quotation I loved:

In his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, the esteemed American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offered perhaps the most resonant of metaphors, compressing 4.5 billion years of planetary history into a 24-hour day.  Our planet’s birth takes place on the stroke after midnight, and the “Cambrian explosion” - in which complex animals first start crawling about - doesn’t happen until 10 p.m. 

Dinosaurs don’t show up until after 11 p.m. and are snuffed out 20 minutes before midnight, while modern humans arrive on the scene in the last two seconds of the day.  Human civilization - some 6,000 years of empire, art, religion, and politics - is squeezed into the last tenth of a second.

Talk about mind-boggling.

Earth almost makes me wish we could really go hog wild and actually get cable television, so I could watch the National Geographic channel.  I think I’d really like it.  Unfortunately, I can just see me spending lots of time watching junk instead, so we’d better not.  I am a reader, through and through, so perhaps I wouldn’t get as much out of the National Geographic channel as I do the books anyway.

Earth: The Biography wins the rare 5 out of 5 stars rating from me.

Hava

Okay, first off, I just wanted to say I have never read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  I have heard that A Brief History of Time is supposed to be the more technical book out of the two, whereas the The Universe in a Nutshell is geared towards people who are not first and foremost scientists.

It is for that reason that I don’t envision myself ever reading A Brief History of Time, since I hardly understood The Universe in a Nutshell.  Here is an example of a mind-bending point that Hawking makes in Universe:

Yang-Mills theory is an extension of Maxwell theory that describes interactions in two other forces called the weak and strong nuclear forces.  However, ground state fluctuations have a much more serious effect in a quantum theory of gravity.  Again, each wavelength would have a ground state energy.  Since there is no limit to how short the wavelengths of the Maxwell field can be, there are an infinite number of different wavelengths in any region of spacetime and an infinite amount of ground state energy.  Because energy density is, like matter, a source of gravity, this infinite energy density ought to mean there is enough gravitational attraction in the universe to curl spacetime into a single point, which obviously hasn’t happened.
~The Universe in a Nutshell, page 46.

Obviously.

I should confess: My last science class was in the 10th grade, where I took biology.  I’m not exactly a science expert.  But if I understand right, I’m just the type of person Hawking was trying to target with this book - someone interested in science and wanting to learn more about the deeper principles and ideas being explored, but who doesn’t have a PhD in anything, let alone theoretical physics.  (I didn’t realize until I started adding links to that sentence, how many book reviews I’ve written on here about books on science, as compared to books about art [Art books reviewed: 0.]  You can tell what I am really interested in.)

In Hawking’s defense, these ideas are extraordinarily complicated, and that’s not exactly his fault.  I can’t imagine a harder task than trying to explain quantum physics to your average Joe, and that’s what Hawking was attempting to do.

I do give him kudos for sprinkling humor throughout the book.  He talks about bets that he’s made with other scientists on obscure scientific theories, added lots of drawings with little green men in them, and then topped it all off with dry humor comments that added spice to the book.  Here’s an example:

It would be possible to detect the radiation from much smaller and hotter black holes, but there don’t seem to be many of them around.  That is a pity.  If one were discovered, I would get a Nobel Prize.
~The Universe in a Nutshell, page 120.

Oh shucks.  If only there were more black holes in our general vicinity.

I read on Amazon that some people were upset with how much Hawking “dumbed down” the science, and wrote scathing remarks that if you knew anything about science, you could just skip this book because nothing in it would be new.  Apparently, I know less than nothing about science (no surprise there).

In the end, I give The Universe in a Nutshell 4 stars out of 5.  If you’re really into this kind of thing, and have the patience to try to unravel some of the theories that Hawking presents, then by all means, enjoy.  There is a lot of information to digest here, if you have the grits and determination to do it.  I liked learning what I could from it, but I doubt I’ll pick it up again.

Hava

PS If you are a fan of all things science like I am, make sure to check out a blogger in the Today.com network who also happens to be a rocket scientist.  Her blog rocks, and is not only informative, but very funny. Hi Stephanie!

Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe by Robin Kerrod & Carole Stott is a flat-out gorgeous book.  I picked it up because the front cover was eye catching and because my inner child still wants to grow up and be an astronaut.

And I fell in love with it from page one.  I have always been a huge astronomy fan, starting from when I would take long walks with my father out in the desert. We’d look at the different constellations, with him giving me info on each one.

So it’s not surprising that I’d be interested in a book about the Hubble telescope.  What is surprising is how much I learned from the book, and how much I enjoyed reading it.  Some of the pictures taken by Hubble are jaw dropping.  Spread over two pages, they are colorful, gorgeous snapshots of deep space.

The pictures are the best part of this book, but that’s not to say that the text isn’t interesting.  The book was loaded with everything from black holes to pulsar stars, and the history behind each discovery.  I felt as if I had taken an in-depth astronomy class by time I finished reading the book.  Even better, it wasn’t dry, boring facts, just thoroughly engrossing reading.

I was really excited to find a site online that allowed me to download a picture from the inside of the book.  Now granted, this picture isn’t one of the larger ones, and it isn’t as colorful as some of the other pictures, and it’ll definitely lose something in translation (from the book to the website to my computer to my website to your computer - whew!!) but at least it gives you an idea of what the book offers.

Isn’t that a cool picture?  One of the things that I was excited to find out is that none of the pictures in the book were “touched up” to provide brighter or more eye-catching colors.  All of the pictures were published exactly how the galaxies look in outer space.  I had no idea our universe was so colorful!

So whether you’re a homeschooling mom who wants to do a section on space, or just someone with even a mild interest in astronomy and the universe, you really need to pick this one up!  I honestly cannot think of a single thing to change about it.  I enjoyed the book from beginning to end.

A rare 5 out of 5 stars for Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe.  Kudos to Robin Kerrod and Carole Stott for a job well done.

Havs

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Anthony Flew was definitely written by a philosopher.  I guess I was expecting too much, I don’t know, but this book was a struggle for me to read the first time around (I’d originally read it several months ago, and then decided to reread it yesterday so I could write a review on here.)  Not surprisingly, it made more sense the second time around.  I’ve never been a big fan of “deep mysteries” where you ask philosophical questions that don’t actually have an answer.  That’s too nebulous for me.  I think philosophy and I don’t get along for the same reason that I’m not a big fan of poetry - I like concrete facts and things that I can categorize in my mind, or at least understand, lol.

Here’s a quotation from the book that left me scratching my head:

“Perhaps the most important and wide-ranging of these insights was that we must become constantly and crisply conscious of how all philosophy (insofar as philosophy is a conceptual inquiry) must be concerned with correct verbal usage.  We can have no access to concepts except through study of linguistic usage, and hence, the use of those words through which these concepts are expressed.” Page 38, There is a God

If you enjoyed that (or even understood that!) you should definitely check out the Journeyman Philosopher here at Today - I think you’d enjoy that site.

For me, that didn’t make much sense. I struggled through the middle of the book (the beginning was written in plain English, and the end wasn’t too bad either - it was the middle where he started explaining his philosophical beliefs that just completely lost me.)  I was almost to the point of giving up when it started to get good again: He started to explain the things that made him change his point of view on atheism, and he did it using language I could understand.

One of the most interesting parts was on page 75 - 78, where he talks about the work done by Gerry Schroeder to disprove the “monkey typing” explanation.  We’ve all heard it: Lock a group of monkeys in a cage and give them computers, and if they banged on the keyboards long enough, they’d eventually be able to produce a sonnet by Shakespeare.  The analogy is often used to explain how it is that this world, galaxy, and universe in all its complexities, could be produced by random chance.  I won’t go into the refutation by Gerry Schroeder because this post is getting too long, but definitely check the book out if you’ve ever thought that this sounded like a reasonable explanation, because Schroeder does an excellent job of tearing that idea apart using simple mathematics.  (Of course disproving an analogy does not disprove the random chance theory, but I did find it interesting that Mr Schroeder was able to disprove it so convincingly.)

In case anyone was wondering, Mr Flew did not become a theist because he attended a revival and “found Jesus.”  Far from it.  He doesn’t believe that there’s life after death, nor does he believe the Christian religion is true (although he does say that if you were to believe that revelation really does happen, Christianity has got the best explanation for it out of all of the religions).  He believes basically that there was some sort of intelligent being who created the universe, galaxy, and world, and then just left it to its own devices, never to bother with any of it again.  This is roughly the same theory that Albert Einstein had.

There’s something in here for everyone: I think the book will by turns offend and then please people, depending on their own ideas of how the universe came into being.   It is a great book to read if you’ve been thinking and wondering about the origins of man and universe - just skip over the boring parts if you get bogged down.  I promise I won’t tattle on you.

4 stars out of 5.  Too many dry spots to rate it higher than that.

Havs