Books
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J. Robert Oppenheimer. A Life, Abraham Pais (ISBN 9780195327120, Oxford University Press)
With the Oppenheimer movie coming out I decided to read a biography first. I didn’t have the one from Kai Bird on which the movie is based (has been rectified in the mean time) but I did have 3 other books on Oppenheimer patiently lying in the library waiting to be read. After googling a…
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Interview with Richard Rhodes about The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I was surfing the web for some information about the Oppenheimer movie and came across this interview with author Richard Rhodes on YouTube in May 2023. Really interesting to hear Rhodes talk about the many people he talked to in the course of writing this book and others. Well addition to reading the actual book.
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Napoleon. Deel 1: van strateeg tot Keizer, Johan op de Beeck (ISBN , 9789022329115, WPG Uitgevers)
Read this biography a second time while on vacation in Austria. I had read the book a few years ago when it first came out in 2019. As the title says it is the first part of a 2 book biography, spanning a little over 1000 pages in total. Johan Op De Beeck worked many…
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10 women who changed science and the world, Catherine Whitlock & Rhodri Evans (ISBN 9781472137432, Robinson)
Another book I picked up in bookstore Dominicanen in July 2022. It is a cheap paperback edition and I have to say I have read better written books of this type of collection of short biographies. Somehow I found the biographies were too much a collection of facts without a soul that inspires. But there…
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First Light, Richard Preston (ISBN 9780679449690, Random House)
I came across a reference to this book while reading The Hot Zone, also from Richard Preston. I wrote another post about The Hot Zone earlier on this blog. Although The Hot Zone is a bit on the sensational side it was definitely well written so I decided to read First Light as well especially…
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A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy (ISBN 978-938831814-3, Hawk Press)
Read this short and apparently well known book from early twentieth century. I came across a reference to it in another book recently although I don’t recall where. Anyway, the book kind of tries to justify being a pure mathematician. With the focus on pure mathematics utility is discarded as a possible justification by Hardy…
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Chasing Venus, Andrea Wulf (ISBN 978-009953832-5, Windmill Books)
This book came out in 2012 when there was another transit of Venus approaching and describes the attempts in the eighteenth century to measure the transit of Venus to determine the size of the solar system. I read this book in a Dutch translation at the end of 2014 the first time and recently read…
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First impressions of The StoryGraph
In another post I mentioned the negative image of Goodreads because it is owned by Amazon and considered as not the right platform for book lovers by some. The StoryGraph was proposed as an alternative for quality seekers. I decided to check it out as I am not a big fan of Amazon myself mainly…
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Looking for a book ?
Ever looked for a book or some details about one ? I had just the other day a book without an ISBN number on the cover which was messing up my digital library system. Luckily the internet came to the rescue. Everything you need is ISBN Search. You can search based on ISBN, title and/or…
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50 books a year
I read an article in De Standaard yesterday from their journalist Jan-Frederik Abbeloos about how he finally managed to read 50 books in 2022. Like me he uses goodreads to keep track of his progress and almost apologises for it (but not really) as it is part of the Amazon evil empire. JF lists some…
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