Category Archives: Book Notes

Andy Weir, THE MARTIAN

Posted on Thursday 30 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I don’t have a lot to say about Andy Weir’s THE MARTIAN, which I finally picked up because 1) it’s popular, having been on bestseller lists for months, and 2) Ridley Scott’s film version arrives on October 2nd (which Gary … Continue reading →

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Cixin Liu, THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

Posted on Wednesday 29 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Three-Body Problem, by Chinese author Cixin Liu and translated by American author Ken Liu (himself winner of numerous awards), is one of the more acclaimed novels of 2014, especially because it’s the first prominent Chinese novel to have been … Continue reading →

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Follow-up thought about KSR’s AURORA

Posted on Monday 27 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

One more thought about Kim Stanley Robinson’s AURORA: I don’t *necessarily* agree with or endorse KSR’s conclusions in this book. Which is to say, human history shows a long pattern of inventing things or implementing things that the previous generation … Continue reading →

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Kim Stanley Robinson, AURORA

Posted on Thursday 23 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I began reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s AURORA on the Sunday before last, in the afternoon, and later that evening realized that I had the answer to an ‘elevator conversation’ question — actually a dinner conversation question with some in-laws — … Continue reading →

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Steven Weinberg, TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD

Posted on Monday 13 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Steven Weinberg is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is best known (I gather) as a leading proponent of the idea that progress in physics will ultimately lead to a small set of fundamental principles that explain everything — i.e. the … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This was the third collection, published in 1983, of Lewis Thomas’s elegant, mostly short, essays, following The Lives of a Cell (which I blogged about last week) and The Medusa and the Snail. I read (or reread, I’m not sure) … Continue reading →

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Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Posted on Tuesday 30 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction (and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). I finally got around to it on my plane flight back east a month ago. The title refers to five prominent … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Lewis Thomas was a pediatrician and doctor, who became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who wrote a series of short essays which were first published in New England Journal of Medicine in the early … Continue reading →

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Revisiting Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Cosmic Connection, published in 1973, was the first popular book by Carl Sagan, after some academic tomes and an anthology of essays about UFOs, who later gained much fame as the author and host of the 1980 book and … Continue reading →

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Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Alan Lightman’s THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE (2014) is a short book of seven essays, most previously published, on various ways the universe is not obviously what it appears to be, or is at odds with what humans might prefer. (Lightman is … Continue reading →

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