Category Archives: Book Notes

Neil deGrasse Tyson, STARRY MESSENGER: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Posted on Sunday 13 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Review: Rather similarly to a couple three other nonfiction books I’ve read lately –- Ari Wallach’s LONGPATH (review here, Jim Al-Khalil’s THE JOY OF SCIENCE (review here), and even Justin Gregg’s IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL (review here) -– this … Continue reading →

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Three Interesting Books That I Probably Won’t Read

Posted on Thursday 10 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

About free markets, the fundamentals of biology, and unsustainable growth. And I probably won’t read them simply because I have so many other books to read, such as the few on a bookcase just to the left of my computer … Continue reading →

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Ari Wallach, LONGPATH: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs

Posted on Saturday 5 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a modest little book with great ambitions to change the way people think. And more power to it if it does. But for anyone who reads science fiction, for example, or is familiar with big issues and long-term … Continue reading →

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G.H. Hardy, A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY (1940)

Posted on Wednesday 2 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

In perusing some of the earliest popular books I read about mathematics, including the ones I’ve blogged about here by George Gamow and Krasner & Newman, and then searching around for any other popular mathematical texts from the early 20th … Continue reading →

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Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science

Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a short little book that is basic but substantive. Familiar yet essential. Frankly, if I had seen it in a bookstore, I would have glanced through it and likely set it back down. Seeing it online made it difficult … Continue reading →

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, and Its Reviews

Posted on Tuesday 11 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is what would be called a “literary science fiction” novel in that it’s clearly SF yet is written by a writer with a “literary” background rather than one in the SF genre, and so whose approach would be expected … Continue reading →

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Kasner & Newman, MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGINATION

Posted on Friday 30 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is another older book out of my library, one to set alongside George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity, which I reviewed back in August. This book is even older. Published in 1940, this is Mathematics and the Imagination, by … Continue reading →

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Prognostic Myopia: More about Justin Gregg

Posted on Thursday 22 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Picking up from where I left off yesterday. My basic summary of this book is: humans are not “stupid”; the issue is that human intelligence has both good and bad consequences, and apparently we can’t have the good without the … Continue reading →

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Justin Gregg: IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL (2022)

Posted on Wednesday 21 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of. Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. … Continue reading →

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Frederik Pohl’s “Outnumbering the Dead”

Posted on Sunday 11 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This week’s novella covered by the Facebook Group reading Gardner Dozois’s big anthology first discussed here is “Outnumbering the Dead” by Frederik Pohl. Coincidentally, it was first published as a chapbook, in December 1992, in the same UK publisher’s line … Continue reading →

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