Books
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The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli (ISBN 978-0471648499, Wiley)
I picked up this tip in a newspaper article long ago (the book is from 2005). The book is written by a professional economist and it makes the case for the global economy by examining the history of t-shirt production. It is a fascinating read of economic and industrial history. It more or less starts…
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The Little Book of the Big Bang: A Cosmic Primer, Craig J. Hogan (ISBN 9780387983851; Springer)
The title of the book describes the content quite well. In roughly 170 pages the author covers the history of our universe from the Big Bang until today. One reviewer on the back cover goes so far as to claim that Hogan has condensed the story into a pleasurable evening. Although the pages are not…
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Oppenheimer. Portrait of an Enigma, Jeremy Bernstein (ISBN 978-1-56663-569-1, Ivan R. Dee)
The third Oppenheimer biography I have read. Compared to the other 2 this is a very brief one. Jeremy Bernstein is a physicist turned science writer who wrote many biographies for The New Yorker. In the introduction of the book he writes he never got around to writing a biography of Oppenheimer for The New…
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Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes (ISBN 978-0-375-71394-1, Vintage Books)
The third book in the series on atomic weapons after ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ and ‘Dark Sun’. Chronologically it also covers the period after these 2 books and covers the nuclear arms race and the negotiations between Gorbatchev and Reagan that finally lead to several treaties that finally lead to a reduction in…
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The Road From Los Alamos, Hans Bethe (ISBN 978-0883187074, American Institute of Physics)
I bought this book after reading the making of the atomic bomb. And then, as usual it ended up sitting on a shelf for a long time. After recently having read Dark Sun I decided it was time to get this book from Hans Bethe behind me. It was actually better than I expected and…
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Dark Sun. The making of the hydrogen bomb, Richard Rhodes (ISBN 9780684824147, Simon & Schuster)
After having read ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ by Richard Rhodes I also had to read this book. It didn’t win the Pulitzer prize although it did make the short list for it. Compared to the award winning ‘The making of the atomic bomb’ I have to agree this book is not as excellent…
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Einstein. His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson (ISBN 9780743264747, Simon & Schuster)
A ‘new’ biography of Einstein by Walter Isaacson came out in 2007. The first biography I read from Isaacson was the one of Steve Jobs which actually came out later, in 2011. I enjoyed the Steve Jobs biography and by looking for other books by Isaacson I came across this Einstein biography. I bought the…
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Schrödinger’s kittens and the search for reality, John Gribbin (ISBN 9781857994025, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
After reading In Search of Schrödinger’s cat by John Gribbin I decided to also read this sequel not really knowing what to expect. His first book is a more or less traditional explanation of quantum mechanics and its bizarre description of reality. Ever since its conception physicists and philosophers have been struggling with the interpretation…
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Piet Vroon: From Bestselling Author to Tragic Story
I read this book a little while ago in October mainly because it was short and I was behind on my reading target for 2025. It is barely 50 pages thick and I read a couple of other books by Piet Vroon long ago that I liked very much. Unfortunately, the quality of the book…
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2025 : My year in books
One nice thing about Goodreads is it makes your reading history easily accessible and it helps to continue reading with challenges and so on. It is a bit like Strava for readers. One nice feature is the setting of your yearly reading challenge and then a recap of the year in books read. I have…
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