Books
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Nickel and Dimed. On (not) getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich (ISBN 9780805063899, Henry Holt & Company)
I finally read this book last week after it had been sitting on a shelf for a decade. Ehrenreich is a journalist who got asked by a publisher to write a piece about the living conditions of low wage workers in America. She decided to find out by getting such a job herself and mimic…
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The Purpose of Reading
‘Why are we reading, if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatise our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our…
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Ralph Waldo Emerson on Productivity
‘If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our…
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The Soul of the Bookstore
‘The bookstore comprises books that have chronometers. As they come and they go, these books compose the bookstore. Too often our impatience as retailers relegates books to the dustbin before the upper chamber of their hourglass has emptied.‘― Jeff Deutsch
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The Art of Time
‘Bookselling is an art, and art takes time and divides it up as art sees fit.‘― Zadie Smith
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Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics, Ruth Lewin Sime (ISBN 978-0-520-20860-5, University of California Press)
This is the second biography of Lise Meitner I read. After reading the biography by Patricia Rife I was at first hesitant to also go and read this book by Ruth Lewin Sime. But after finishing the book I have to say it was well worth every minute. Where the biography of Patricia Rife focused…
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Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Patricia Rife (ISBN 978-0817637323, Birkhäuser)
A very nice biography about one of the ‘forgotten’ women of science. I came across a reference to this book somewhere and decided to read it as part of my ‘atomic’ theme. It also fits nicely into a series of books I am reading about women scientists. I had read the excellent ‘The making of…
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A Tour of the Calculus, David Berlinski (ISBN 978-0-679-74788-8, Vintage Books)
A Tour of the Calculus is a strange and unique book. According to text on the back it is likely to become a classic as Gödel, Escher, Bach. But I doubt that very much. The book was written in 1995 and so far I haven’t come across it in any list of classics. I also…
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The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin (ISBN 978-039472625-0, Vintage)
This book by Daniel Boorstin was first published in 1983. I read the Dutch translation around 1995 at which time it made quite an impression on me. In my mind it was still among the best books I have read. End of last year I decided to read it again but in the original English…
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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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