Books
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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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Mathematical Scandals
Short little book by an American math teacher for people (teenagers) who think mathematics is dull. The idea is to do this by bringing the human side of mathematicians to the forefront. 21 mathematicians are covered in 136 pages. Each chapter starts with a fictitious dialogue to outline the ‘scandal’. If you are interested in…
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No Ordinary Genius. The Illustrated Richard Feynman, Christopher Sykes (ISBN 978-039331393-2, W. W. Norton)
I came across a reference to this book in another book I read about Feynman and it ended up on my list. I bought it last year and then decided end of 2022 to start reading it while I was also reading The Discoverers to add a bit of light reading in the mix. Christopher…
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Understanding the Universe. An introduction to physics and astrophysics, James B. Seaborn (ISBN 978-146126868-0, Springer)
James Seaborn has been teaching an introductory course for many years and this book is the translation into book form of that course. The book is intended for non science majors and teaches physics with an emphasis on topics and applications in astrophysics. I was curious to learn how that approach would work. The result…
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Command And Control, Eric Schlosser (ISBN 9780141037912, Penguin)
Command and Control is written by Eric Schlosser. I read his bestseller fastfood nation long ago and liked it a lot so when this book came out in 2014 I bought it and read it. It was a scary read at the time and this year while we were on holiday this summer I decided…
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