Books
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Serendipity
Back in 2003 I learned myself html by reading the html 4 for the worldwide web, a visual quickstart guide from Elizabeth Castro and then wrote my first website. Castro is an American tech writer who wrote numerous books about certain aspects of website development. She is also active in the Catalan independence movement. After…
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Gravity’s Fatal Attraction. Black Holes in the Universe, Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees (ISBN 978-1-108-81905-3, Cambridge University Press)
I just finished reading this book. I found a reference to it in another book I read recently. It is a really peculiar book, I have not read anything like it before. As the title suggests it deals with gravitation and how its unique characteristics lead to black holes. It has no equations in it…
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Looking After Your Books, Francesca Galligan (ISBN 978-1-85124-627-4, Bodlean)
This book was a tip from the newspaper I read. The author is deputy head of rare books at the Bodlean libraries, university of Oxford. The background and passion for books of the author is the strong point of the book and in my opinion the reason to read this book. A book by a…
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The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler (ISBN 978-0-141-39453-4, Penguin Classics)
I read about this book in another one about the effort to send people to Mars. I wrote a short post about that book earlier. This book is a mix of history a of science and an analysis of the scientific method. From the latter perspective it presents an alternative to the well known Structure…
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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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