Carbon (one atom's odyssey) - John Barnett ***

This book is based on a clever, high concept approach - following the existence of a carbon atom from its creation billions of years ago through its role in geology and then living organisms on Earth, ending up in the author's brain as he writes the story. Along the way we see the molecules that the carbon has been part of - often something simple like carbon dioxide, but sometimes in more complex organic molecules (and for no explained reason a buckyball when the Milky Way galaxy forms).

The book is illustrated with accomplished black and white pencil drawings by John Barnett These are fine, but the format used is odd. What we have here is basically the format of an illustrated book for seven-year-olds - it really took me back to reading to my children. There are big double pages spreads of the drawings - some with no text at all, others with a single paragraph of text, all in an extra-large format book. This isn't a children's title though - which meant it felt extremely skimpy for an adult audience. I'd read it in under 10 minutes.

Another small issue is that the author and Roald Hoffmann, who wrote the preface, go on at some length about Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. This book actually has in its acknowledgements 'As a form of honor and thanks to the humanity and grace of Primo Levi.' Which is fine if you're a fan of Levi's book, but probably doesn't help if you've never read it - which will be the case for the majority of the potential audience.

For me, Carbon was disappointing as it was neither fish nor fowl. It was designed like a children's book, but aimed at an adult audience. Like other adult novelty books (adult pop-up books, for example), it had far too little content to be satisfying.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog