Everyday Survival – Laurence Gonzales ***

This, like every game of football comes in two halves. The first is a delight. There was no doubt while reading this that Everyday Survival would be awarded five stars. The second gets into a bit of a mess that doesn’t really merit more than two stars – so the resultant rating is an average.

I absolutely loved Laurence Gonzales’ description of how we make mistakes and errors when the way we are programmed to react, allowing the older, lower segments of the brain to take control, fails to cope with a misunderstanding or unnoticed change in the situation. I won’t spoil his policeman after training to disarm someone with a gun anecdote here, but it is absolutely wonderful – I’ve been telling everyone I can think on ever since. I even experienced this sort of error myself this week. Every Thursday I have to go and switch on the heating in a hall where I will be running an event in the evening. This Thursday I went along and flicked the switch. However, when I came back later the hall was cold. I hadn’t noticed someone had left the heating on. I was just programmed to flick the switch and didn’t notice I was turning it off rather than on. For me this was just a mild irritation. Gonzales shows us how it can lead to people putting themselves at risk or losing their lives.

The book is also interesting in the way it ventures into an exploration of early man, and apes to see where this programmed ability and survival risk comes from. However, then the book wanders, drifting out into global warming, our impact on the planet, the nature of entropy and our role as energy conduits, which collectively results in a handful of chapters that have none of the appeal of the early chapters, which ramble and really give the reader very little more than a vague sense of unease.

The contrast I think is nicely summed up in a wonderful line Gonzales gives us. ‘Exactly how does the big bang, some 10 or 20 million years ago, go about producing Fruity Cheerios?’ A wonderful idea, ruined by substituting ‘million’ for ‘billion.’ A real shame.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

Search This Blog