I am a book. I am a Portal to the Universe - Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick ***

Although not providing a direct parallel, there's something reminiscent here of Jan Pienkowski's wonderful adult pop-up books, which used a style that was more familiar in a children's book than something we would expect to find in a title for more mature readers. Similarly, I am a Book looks like a children's book (handling it, it feels strangely like a board book, though it proudly announces on the back that it has 112 pages) and in the mildly outrageous claim to be a 'portal to the universe'.

What we get is a series of very colourful and dramatically, if sometimes minimalistically, illustrated pages with small amounts of text, making observations about everything from biology to cosmology.

Sometimes the approach can be very effective. So we have a whole page dedicated to the words 'Touch this dot' alongside… a dot. But the facing page tells us 'You just left behind 100,000 bacteria,' which is neat. There are quite a few pages dedicated to demonstrating the size of various things using different graphic approaches. This may be more in Rutherford's stamp collecting approach to science than anything particularly deep, but it's fun, engaging and quick to absorb.

I am not convinced, however, that this approach gives us too much of an insight into what science is about. Apart from anything else, the very knowing, first person approach used, as if the book is talking to the reader, is both irritating and hugely wasteful of space. We get, for example, a whole page dedicated to saying 'With my four inks I can unleash an avalanche of colour'. So? Do I really need a book to tell me that colour printed books can show colour?

Sometimes the content is, frankly, uninspiring. At one point we get a whole two-page spread to tell us 'Everything is changing - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. Things are beginning and ending, all the time.' No, really? I'm amazed. (Sarcasm.)

I so wanted this book to be brilliant and challenging and different. It is different, and sometimes inspiring, but I think it could have gone much further and contained a lot more. (There is a short explanatory section at the back for each of the points made, but this kind of appendix rarely gets read.) Without doubt, it is absolutely great that the authors have tried something different. But I am not sure that I am a Book achieves what it sets out to do.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Search This Blog