Here are some of the books I've read (Updated 2011-01-22)
I've stopped writing detailed reviews here, there are professionals out there who do
a much better job at this. I've just listed some of the more memorable books in more or less chronological order
Why the West Rules the World - For Now (Ian Morris)
The Elephant's Journey (Jose Saramago)
Fragment (Warren Fahy)
The City and City (China Mieville)
Fred Hoyle's Universe (Jane Gregory)
Zima Blue (Alistair Reynolds)
My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
1421 (Ganin Menzie)
Pirate Latitudes, Prey, Next (Michael Crichton)
The Brooklyn Follies (Paul Auster)
Invisible, Travels in the Sciptorium (Paul Auster)
Payback (Margaret Atwood)
Amberville (Tim Davys)
The Great wall (Jon Man)
Voices (Ursula Le Guin)
Seeing Further (Bill Bryson)
Salt, Cod (Mark Kurlansky)
The Road to Reality (Roger Penrose)
Empire of the Stars (Arthur I. Miller)
The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)
The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)
The Swarm (Franz Schätzing)
Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-up Bord Chronicle, The Elephant Vanishes (Haruki Murakami)
The City and City (China Miéville)
Revelation Space (Alistair Reynolds)
Kraken (China Miéville)
False Economy (Alan Beattie)
The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Iain Mcgilchrist)
Freakonomics (S.D. Leavitt and S.J. Dubner)
DNA (James Watson)
Blotta Tanken (Peter Gärdenfors)
Akvedukten vid Zaghoun, Shumalmits väg, På Spaning efter folkviljan (Per Molander)
Tecken att Tänka med (Pehr Sällström)
The Making of the Atom Bomb (Richard Rhodes)
Anathem by
Neal Stephenson. The new book by
Stephenson takes place on a world called Arbre very similar to ours. The leading character Erasmus
is a Fraa, a sort of monk in a cloister where studies in natural science, mathematics and rational
and critical thought are encouraged and religion and superstition are not. The world is
separated into a an external "Saecular" (quasi religious) world and the "maths".
Erasmus is a "tenner", which means that every tenth year, he and his fellow Fraas in their math are
allowed in the external world, with a choice to
remain on the outside or continue to be a student of the maths. Suddenly one day, the local observatory is closed
and all astronomical observations are kept secret. Erasmus' mentor Fraa Orolo with deep insights into astronomy is
recruited ("vocated") by the Saecular world, and a fantastic story unfolds that forever changes the lives
of people on the planet Arbre.
Stephenson has invented parallell terms for the multitude of ideas that is being played with in the book, and
it may be toughh reading the first 50 pages but a dictionary helps and soon most of the terms become familiar.
My personal favourite Arbrian word is "bulshytt", the almost one-to-one equivalent to our existing corporate
and management bullshit that keeps infesting languages in our industrialized world. I also liked his use of French
in the book: Arbre = Tree, Laterre = Earth, etc, no doubt there to convey the idea that not all Earthlings
are from New York.
You will find references to General Relativity, Gödel, Plato and Everett's multi-world interpretation of
Quantum mechanics, to mention a few. I for one thoroughly enjoyed the playfullness with which
Stephenson toys with ideas in philosophy and science and gives them slightly new twists. If you liked Pynchon's
Against the Day which I read last year,
you will find the same great lucidity, humour and above all, a passion for ideas and creativity
in Anathem. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and only wish I had lasted longer. My only reservation is that
the "maths" seem to take very limited use of computers ("syndevs"), which is not very
realistic when (for example) performing complex orbit calculations or studying perturbation theory.
As a former Ph.D. student I would relish the thought of a university ("math") where
curiosity for its own sake would be reason enough to fulfill academic studies,
as opposed to today's very crass view of knowledge as a commodity.
The Terror by
Dan Simmons. I for one am a sucker for good adventure
story, I thoroughly enjoyed
Björn Larsson's
Long John Silver and a few month's ago I came across Dan Simmons book on a best seller
shelf in my favourite book shop in Stockholm. I normally trust the taste of the employees
of this shop, and besides who wouldn't fall for a title like the "The Terror". And
after having finsished the book today, I put it down with
remorse blaming my self for reading it too fast. Set in the Canadian archipelago in 1840:ies, the
background story is the British explorer John Franklin's endeavour to find the North West
passage. Franklin had hitherto not been an overly sucessful captain and was know as the man
who ate his own shoes. Little is actually known what actually
happened to the expedition,
and here is where Simmons weaves a great story using historical facts and fascinating (but fake as far
as I have understood) Inuit mythology. Simmons manages to tell a tight story of the incredible
hardships of the crew of the vessel "The Terror", including (and historically accurate) the badly
sealed canned food tin cans - that the admirality had purchased - that most likely slowly lead poisoned
the whole crew. Add to that the terrible climate, a lurking terror of all teeth and claws on the ice,
and a mysterious Inuit mute woman and you are nailed to the book until your eyes go sore. A highly
recommened nailbiter, I ruined the nail of my left thumb in the process of reading it...
(in all honesty that probably says more about me than the book).
The God Delusion by
Richard Dawkins.
Yet another book by Dawkins, but I give no apologies here; this is recommended
reading for anyone interested in a critical view of faith and religion. At high school
we were a bunch of 4-5 youngsters who sometimes (strangely enough,
without the influence of alcohol) talked about things like the origin of life etc,
and sometimes we also touched in religion. I remember especially our notion of a "hook"
upon which both basic concepts of science and religions hinges, and I was deligted
to find the same metaphores
in this book, but with a different twist. Dawkins' "Skyhook" is something supernational (like "God")
whereas a "crane" is something with actually explains something. Even though I am an ardent
atheist - with a very short agnostic period in the early teens - this book book is still
a gem when it comes to dissecting the very concept of religion and why it exists. I firmly
believe that Dawkins is on the right track when he says that it is most likely a by-product
of a mechanism in the brain that has survived over the millenia. It might be related to the
Placebo effect, and maybe also to the concept of altruism among small social populations;
it is obvious there is a lot of room for research here.
As expected by Dawkins, it is also a book of humour littered with quotes from the literature
and films (From Victor Hugo to "Life of Brian") and it is obvious this is a book of passion.
No direct assault is directed towards specific religious beliefs or texts, but given todays
extreme views in both the United States and in the muslem world, both fundamentalsist Christians and
Islamists are direct targets here.
I looked up some of the sites Dawkins' quotes in the book and indeed found some the alternatives
to the 10 commandments, like this one.
My personal favourites are:
- 5:th commandment: Live life with a sense of Love and Wonder.
- 6:th commandment: Always seek to be learning something new.
Probably the best book (of all the ones that didn't make it here) I've read this year!
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by
Susanna Clarke.
The Raven King wrote: "Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me;
the second shall long to behold me; the first shall be governed by thieves and murderers;
the second shall conspire at his own destruction".
At the turn of 17:th century England is ruled by the mad king George the III:rd,
Europe is being ravaged by Napoleon, the age of reason and science
is blooming and what little magic is left is in the hand of "theoretical magicians", who are
themselves unable to perform real magic. Out of nowhere (=Yorkshire) a dry little man performs
what is believed the first real magic since the days of the . This causes a sensation
and the dry little man - Mr Norrell - is persuaded to move to London to gain wealth and
earn a reputation. Soon he is forced to perform a piece of black magic to save the life of the
wife of his benefactor, and shortly after that a 2:nd magician comes onto the scene
- Jonathan Strange - soon to become Mr. Norrells apprentice.
It's impossible to describe the story of this 1000 page long Novel; the best I can do is to
compare it to Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Mervyn Peake. The geographic setting is England, Spain and
Venice, from London to rainy dark northern England, sunny Spain, foggy Waterloo and mysterious
roads (or portals) leading into Faery, the land of magic. It's simply a unique and wonderful novel
that should be digested in front of an open fire a rainy weekend. I enjoyed it immensely and
as much as I also enjoyed Harry Potter this novel has much more depth and learning. Some reviewers
have compared it to Eco "Focault's Pendelum", and I agree. Recommended to everyone who - like me - believes
the world could do better with more magic in it! Winner of the
Hugo award 2005. Strangely
enough I finished reading the book as the film
The Prestige opened at my local cinema. This film, based on the
book by Christopher Priest, is
also about 2 magicians and is highly recommended for the plot and its fun combination of "real" magic and
illusions.
"The Ancestor's Tale" by
Richard Dawkins.
There is a notion among readers of Science Fiction books called "sense of wonder",
meaning that you as a reader find yourself awed by an idea or a scenario in a book. I got the
same feeling reading The Ancestor Tale, which is not SF but belong to one the best and passionate
popular science books I have read. I'm a physicist by training and (sadly with age) often
succumb to "the bottom" line approach to reading, often impatiently leafing through pages
waiting for the punch line.
No so while reading this book: I found myself enchanted by Dawkins' marvellous ability
to explain the most complicated problems and technicalites ranging from a chapter of
cladograms
to
Manfred Eigen's
hypercycle theory of macrocellular evolution
as a theory - one of many - of the origins of life.
Written in the style of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", Dawkins traces back the evolutionary tree starting
(arbitrarily) from humans and ending up with Eukaryots in a series of 39 "rendezvous points".
One reason for going backwards is to stress the point that evolution has no goals towards
"higher" organimsm (aka humans), with obvious address to creationists. A second reason for the
backward tracing of our ancestors - which he has coined "concestor", closest ancestor - is to stress
that we do not evolve from Chimpanzees but from a "concestor" that gave rise to both chimps and humans.
There is a wonderful chapter of the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind", in which he describs contenders
of Darwinism that often insist upon an event in history when two "chimps" must have given birth
to Homo Sapiens. This is a typical "lawyer's" argument which might be used in a court of law to
fool a jury of uneducated laymen. Evolution simply doesn't work that way, which time and again
followers of the idea of "intelligent design" fail to understand. With new tools at hand
like molecular clocks taxonomists and biolgists can trace back the origins of the evolutionary
tree to unprecedented detail, which would be impossible using just fossil records and morphology.
Another fascinating
fact that is common to both whales and microbes is "Kleiber's law": metabolism and mass are related
(logarithmically) in a scaling law with a power of 3/4. Until recently this was regarded as a mystery,
until a paper by Enquist et al.
showed that it was a consequence of fractcal scaling of vessels of all animals. The argument has
been generalized
to a scaling law where the assumption is that lifeforms (plants and animals) makes use of self similar
fractal networks of vessels (vascular or blood) with a given invariant length scale.
I for one appreciated his personal style, ranging from views of scientsists with opposing
views, to outspoken opinions of present political leaders and worrying trends in developing
technology devoted to the efficient killing of people.
The book is recommended to anyone who is interested in evolution and orgins of life. It may not
be his best work in style, but there is massive amounts of information and thoroughly enjoyed
every page.
"The Pillars of the Earth"
by Ken Follet.
Unlike his previous books of action and intrigue, this is an historical novel which neatly sums up
Follet's fascination for the era of the great cathedral
builders. It focuses on the fictious little
monastery of Knightsbridge somewhere in medieval England - close to Marlborough, just south of Swindon -
in the 12:th century. An ambitious monk takes over the
mismanaged priory and together with a stone mason and his son transforms the little village
into a thriving new town, while the surrounding county is being ravished by a vicious Earl under a
succession of weak kings during the period of English history called the
Anarchy.
By no means this novel is lacking in suspense; the opening chapter begins
with a hanging and a curse and after more than 1000 pages ends with a new king and a long expected second
hanging. We have then witnessed all the hardships of the priory in trying to survive a ruthless
bishop, a blood-thirsty knight/Earl who knows nothing except the life as a soldier, and the fate
of the clever daughter of the former Earl who is depraved of her comfortable life and has to support
her brother's ambition to take revenge on their father's death, and the second generation stone
mason who after having seen the new elegant cathedral in St. Denis
in France, comes back to England to erect a magnificent gothic cathedral
using the latest state of the art technology. This is a page-turner which deprived me of many nights
of good sleep and made tedious train journeys a pure joy, and is simply historial ficton at its best.
"Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum.
When I was a teenager I often leafed through the collection books in my parent's library.
At one time I found a little thin book called "A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitj" by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. I read it in a few days and I remember being moved by the atmosphere of hopelessness
and despair in the russian work camp. After having read Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer prize
winning book "Gulag" I get the same feeling of being deeply moved, now mixed with great anger. Unlike
the books by former prisoners and victims of Stalin's and NKVD's terror, this book is the first attempt
of an outside historian/journalist to write the history of Gulag. Gulag is an acronym for "Glavoji upravlenije
lagerej" or "The Main Directorate for Corrective Labour Camps" and was under the control by the secret police (
the Cheka, subsequently NKVD) during the terror of Stalin.
The main difference between the Nazi concentration camps and Gulag was that Stalin's purpose was not to
exterminate a certain group of people but to force them to comply to the system.
Since the Bolsjevik rule was notoriously inefficient in providing for its people,
Gulag quickly became a system for slave labour and was an integral (however inefficient) part
of the communist economy. Unlike Nazi regime however, book-keeping and statistics was
notoriuosly ill-kept and it was in the interest of
everybody to exagerate and lie about production, the number of prisoners, their health and the death
toll. Therefore nobody really knows how many people died and suffered in the camps.
Up to now the best estimate is that around 28 million people passed through the system, and at least
2-3 million people died in the camps. This is to be added to the massive numbers that were killed
in the second world war and as a result of starvation and terror imposed on the Russian people by
the Bolsjeviks.
The book is divided into three parts, the origin of Gulag, life and labour in the camps,
and the rise and fall of the labour camp system. The middle part is filled with the testimonies by survivors and
is truly heartbreaking. To me the most shocking aspect is the total lack of compassion
and empathy shown by people in the system, not just by the people in high places responsible but also by the
soldiers and guards in the camps. Applebaum has written a compassionate book based on
extensive research and interviews and should be read by anyone with an interest in Russian history.
The final chapter is a plea: Unless the atrocities by the communist rule are ventilated publicly -
like nazism has been in the past decades in Germany - the collective memory will continue
to haunt russians for generations to come.
"Girl with a Pearl Ear Ring"
by Tracy Chevalier. As the story starts in 1664, the young girl Griet lives with her poor
but relatively happy protestant family in Delft together with her sister and brother.
When her father becomes blind from an accident at the Kiln factory, she is forced to seek
employment at the house of the catholic family of Johannes Vermeer as a maid. She leaves her
family with a heavy heart, and is soon exposed to the ungrateful chores
of heavy house work. She is quite an unusual girl, however, and takes a genuine interest
in her master's paintings in the studio. Vermeer is a perceptive person
and after some time introduces Griet to the art of preparing colours. Soon
a very special relation develops between the two, and she is partly
relieved from the daily routines in the household to prepare Vermeers
colours in the Attic. This is much to the dismay of the other members of the
houshold, and she soon has to contend with the fiercly loyal maid
and a volatile mistress. Because Vermeer paints painstakingly slowly they can't
live off the income from his work and has to survive from income from his
stepmother and a local Patron. The Patron is tolerated by the family,
but when he takes a rather to keen an interest in Griet, Vermeer sees this
as a challenge and reluctantly makes a painting of Griet to please his benefactor.
In the end his jealous wife discovers the painting and thinks it's obscene
and tries to destroy it, and Griet is forced to leave the employment. By that
time she has become friendly with a local butcher's son and marries him as
a way out of her predicament (and for love too, eventually). This is a lovely story
with a fantastic sense of detail and atmosphere. What struck me was
Chevalier tells the story in the first person and the use of simple
language both reflects Griet's personality while creating an almost unreal
prescence. "...moving, mysterious, at times unbearably poignant.", said the
Times and I can only agree. The film
film also made a very good job of capturing the atmosphere in the book.
"Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. First published in
1952, this was Vonnegut's first novel and is still one of his
most interesting and disturbing books. The title refers to
the one of first examples of automation, the self-playing
piano. It is set in a future North America where society has
become a elitist nightmare where everyone is provided for,
but no one except people belonging to a small class of elite
technocrats, has any real purpose. I read this book many
years ago when I - ironically - was doing my Ph.D. on the
topic of automatic image interpretation. The book was an
eye-opener for me, and today with jobs disappearing and
information technology replacing people at an alarming rate,
one might ask if the gloomy utopia in the book is coming true
at last. Many of his books reflect the fact that technology
always has good and bad sides and that we have to learn to
live with the consequences. Jospeh Schumpeter stated that to
build new economies one has to destroy the old ones, and this is
nothing new. What is new is that the process of replacing people
with software and machines is accelerating and jobless growth
is nowdays a fact we have to live with. The question is
what people without double doctorates and or superhuman faculties
will do in the future when the labour market continues to sift
out the less capable, the not-so-smart, the not-so-young and
the not-willing-to-work-around-the clock.
"The Space
Merchants" by Frederic Pohl & Cyril M. Kornbluth.
Published a year after Vonnegut's "Player Piano", this novel
emerged in McCarthy America where communist phantoms were
being chased by more or less ruthless (and sometimes even
comic) means. The plot is simple: In the future, the world is
run not by governments and states, but by gargantuan
advertsing agencies. The word of the day is Sell, Sell, Sell.
The "hero" Mitch Courtenay - a producer - finds himself in a
campaign to sell the hellish planet Venus to future
colonizers by any means possible. By a series of misfortunes
he finds himself on the wrong side of the producer-consumer
chain, and has to start consuming the products that his
agency promotes. This was a radical satire when it was
published, and a reaction to the rampant consumerism in the
US in the fifties. It is a hilarious book, a Swiftian satire
and like all good books, had a lot to tell us about society
in the fifties, and - more chillingly - about today's world.
I've often re-read it not just for the laughs.
"Guns,
Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. This is probably
the most interesting book I have read in many years and a
rewnewal of "Macro History" in the vein of Oswald Spengler,
Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbons, but with ecology at the
topical center. It is no less than an attempt to understand
why human societies and civilisation developed more rapidly
in some parts of the world than others. Diamond argues
convincingly that geography, climate and biological factors
were paramount in giving Europe and China a head start in the
development of technology and culture. The fact that the
continent of Eurasia is elongated in the east-west direction
and the existence of the right animals and the right crops
were the main reasons why Europe became a dominant player on
the world scene. In the last chapter he argues that history
as a research topic rightfully belongs not to the humanaties
but rather to the sciences. The scope of the book is truly
breathtaking and anyone who believes that history is just
"one fact after another" should pick up this book and be
awed. Any theory that grasps over so many topics will be open
to healthy criticism, and a good review and critique is found
here.
His latest book "Collapse" is also compulsory
reading if you are interested in the mechanisms of failure
and success of ancient and recent societies, and the lessons
we can learn today.
"Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: on the matter of the
mind" by Gerald Edelman. A fascinating account of a
theory of the workings of the brain, based on Darwinistic
selection on the neuronal level. Highly speculative, but
contains many interesting ideas on the micro and macro
levels, the most famous perhaps being his idea of "neural
Darwinism". Falls short on his criticism why computers cannot
simulate/emulate minds, but gives a great introduction to the
neuroscience of the brain.
"The Astonishing Hypothesis" by Francis Crick
(1916-2004). A book about how to attack the problem of
consciousness, and an update on the latest developments in
the search for the principles of information processing in
the brain. More book reviews on epistemplogy, consciousness
and mind can be found here.
"Myrorna" (Les
Fourmis) "Le Jour des Fourmis" et "La Révolution
des Fourmis" par Bernard Werber. Voilà un extrait du
son page du Web: "Le temps que vous lisiez ces lignes, sept
cents millions de fourmis seront nées sur la planète. Sept
cents millions d'individus dans une communauté estimÉe à un
milliard de milliards, et qui a ses villes, sa hiérarchie,
ses colonies, son langage, sa production industrielle, ses
esclaves, ses mercenaires... Ses armes aussi. Terriblement
destructrices". Des livres charmants sur la communication
entre des hommes et des fourmis, et qui posent la question si
l'intelligence des hommes est plus puissante que celle des
myriades des insects dans notre planète.
"An
Anthropologist on Mars", by Oliver Sacks. A
fascinating and compassionate description of people/patients
with different neurolological disorders. I had wanted to read
his books for years, but was a bit sceptical about the ethics
of disclosing information on "neurological freaks". After
having read only a few chapters, I've entirely changed my
mind and I can recommend it simply as bedtime reading, or on
a more profound level, a book on the roots of "self" and
"personality".
"The Club Dumas", by Arturo Perez-Reverte. A literary
thriller about a mercenary/trader specializing in recovering
old and rare books, who finds his life in peril after
uncovering 3 copies of books that - with proper decoding -
together hold secrets of unearthly powers. If you liked the
"The name of Rose", you'll love this book which was recently
turned into a film by Roman Polanski, "The Ninth Gate".
"Fermat's
Last Theorem", by Simon Singh. A book about the
remarkable intellectual achievement of many mathematicians,
leading up to Andrew Wiles' final proof of Fermat's theorm,
via the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture. The theorem itself is
simply stated:
"There are no solutions of the equation xn +
yn = zn for integers n > 2". This
took more that 4 centuries of hard work to prove. The
ultimate question is of course how Fermat himself (if indeed
at all) managed to prove it. The book also contains several
interesting anecdotes, and - to me at least - unknown facts,
such as Fermat's influence on Newton leading the latter to
the calculus of infinitesimals. Well worth reading even for
people with a fear of numbers.
"The
Mathematical Brain", by Brian Butterworth. It is well
known that the brain has specially dedicated areas for higher
sensory, motory, and cognitive faculties. For example, the
primary visual areas are situated in the Occipital lobes. But
what about the ability to perform number and mathematical
operations? Is there a 'number module' in the brain? It turns
out there is strong evidence for the existence of such a
centre, and is it located somewhere in the left parietal
lobe. It also turns out it is spatially close to the centre
that controls finger movements. Thus it is not coincidence
that we use our fingers when we count. This is fascinating
book, full of facts and anecdotes, and also describes how
ingenious experiments can be set up to reveal the secrets
behind the number crunching parts of the brain.
"The
Feeling of what Happens", by Antonio Damasio. During
the last decade there have been several attempts to describe
the origins and workings of human consciousness in sciences
as diverese as Philisophy (Daniel Dennet), Artificial
Intelligence (Douglas Hofstadter, John Holland),
Neurophysiology (Gerald Edelman, Francis Crick, Jean-Pierre
Changeaux), and Cognitive Science (Patricia Churchland).
Antonio Damasio became well-known to the general public with
his book "Descartes' Error", which describes the "Cartesian
theatre" fallacy that dominated brain science until the
latter part of this century. The current book takes a
different standpoint from most other books: what is it like
to feel consciousness? What would it be like _not_ to have a
feeling of consciousness? The following quote gives the
essence of Damasio's thoughts here: "The nonconscious neural
signaling of an individual organism begets the proto-self
which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow
for an autobiographical self, which permits extended
consciousness. At the end of the chain extended consciousness
permits conscience." Probably the most interesting book I
read in 2001!
"The Scar" . China Miéville's third novel is set in
the same world as the appraised "Perdido Street
Station", which has won several well-deserved awards. For
those of you not yet familiar with the dark fantasy world of
the gothic Megapolis of New Croubzon, you're about to enter a
great adventure. Being a film addict myself, I immediately
found references to the movie screen: Imagine a hybrid of
"Waterworld" and "The army of the Twelve Monkeys"; then you
get an idea what the world you find yourself in (the stories
otherwise have nothing in common). I fell for the combination
of low and high tech gadgets, the world populated with
archaic species and humans, and most of all, the fleshy and
eloquent language. You get to smell the sordid smells of a
wounded Avanc, the frantic hunger of a buzzing mosquito
woman, the strange life forms populating the floating pirate
city "the Armada", admire the many-talents of the New
Croubzon spy Silas Fennec, and feel for the many sorrows of
the main character Bellis Coldwine. Is it fantasy or
science-fiction? Who really cares..
"The Dream of Scipio" by Iain Pears. A novel about
the fate of three men in Provence in southern France,
spanning 1500 years of European history: the period just
after the murder of the Roman emperor Majoran during the
realm of the Visigoth king Euric, Avignon during the Black
Death (recent research has cast some doubt whether it really
was the bubonic plague or some other disease), and the period
just before and during the German occupation of France in
WWII. I especially liked the way he interweaved the fate of
the characters by having them work out moral dilemmas in
their own different ways. The book gave me the feeling of
what life was really like in historical times, and how
similar the problems of modern life are to those of historic
times. The title alludes to a scripture by Cicero "The Dream
of Scipio" about the importance of maintaining a high moral
when keeping a public office. If you like this book then
don't miss "An Instance
of the Fingerpost" a thouroughly researched book
about a (fictious) murder mystery in Oxford just after the
deatch of Oliver Cromwell, starring real historical
characters like mathematician John Wallis and antiquary
Anothony Wood.
"Mathematics in Nature: Modeling Patterns in the natural
World" by John A. Adam. This is a delightful book
about topics that we almost never get to study in university
graduate or under-graduate courses. The book has 14 chapters
with topics ranging from how to obtain order-of-magnitude
estimates of physical quantities, to the maximum height of
trees, non-linear waves (such as bores and solitons), and the
Fibonacci structure of meandering rivers. The approach is
that of a modeler who wants to give examples of how
relatively simple mathematics can yield surprisingly
acccurate correct estimates of the "real thing". Unfortunately,
in my edition there are a number of mistakes and typos, so the book
should be read with caution. For example, on page 53 in the derivation
of the volume of a crater from a surface explosion, the T2 in the first factor
should be T-2. And, on page 279, the Airy equation (31)
d²θ/dξ² ± ξ θ = 0
should be defined with a minus sign to yield the results in the text.
I also sometimes found the derivations hard to follow, so it helps repeating
some of the arguments with paper and pencil. For those of
you who abhore any kind of forumla, there are very readable
chapters that cover the essence of each subject in words.
