Skip to main content

Seasonal review 2022

Image from Unsplash
There may not be any reviews here now until January 2023 as we like to take a break - but our reviews will be back again in January.

Topics come and go in the popular science world - looking back over 2022, brains/consciousness, climate change, AI and space/cosmology have been the most dominant in terms of review titles. As someone with a particular interest in physics and maths, I'd love to see a few more of those next year. And chemistry remains the least covered of the core science subjects. 

A few years ago I speculated on why this was the case. Back then (2017) this site had 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. Admittedly, there is always a danger of editorial bias, but I have certainly never avoided chemistry titles if publishers sent them my way. They simply don't arrive. Publishers I spoke to at the time suggested that chemistry was, perhaps not 'sexy' enough.

Meanwhile we have seen some topics that don't get much coverage do well. I want to highlight Henry Gee's A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, which recently (deservedly) won this year's Royal Society's book prize. I have to include a disclaimer that I count Henry as a friend - but then that's case with a good number of other UK-based science writers. It also points to the positive side of social media, which usually only gets bad press. I first 'met' Henry through a now long-defunct Nature initiative of setting up blogs on their website, which we both took part in (Henry also works for the publication). I think I've only met Henry twice in person, but our online interactions more than make up for this.

It's not, however, just chemistry that suffers in terms of exposure. This site covers popular science and science fiction books. I have written elsewhere how SF (and other genre fiction) is regarded as a poor cousin of literary fiction. Similarly, I'd suggest, popular science tends to be somewhat sidelined in the non-fiction world. My local independent bookshop has one shelf (not one bookcase) of popular science titles. Waterstones, the UK's biggest bookshop chain, seems to have subsumed popular science entirely into their vague 'smart thinking' section (at least in the store I go in most often). 

What's more, I noticed the other day that the respectable publisher OneWorld, which has a good science list, recently put out a 'Christmas Gift Guide' with a sole popular science contribution of Sean Carroll's interesting but hardly approachable Biggest Ideas in the Universe title. Don't listen to them! Popular science (and SF) books make great gifts.

I think part of the problem is that there is a view in the literary world that good books have to be hard going. Anything that smacks of being enjoyable - whether it's well written popular science or entertaining science fiction - takes second place to titles that are worthy. This particularly comes across when newspapers do a 'What I'm reading' thing. You know for certain that what the chosen celebrities will list are books that are considered challenging. Frankly, for me, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I don't read to suffer, I read for enjoyment and interest. But that rarely seems to be a criterion in the literary world.

Luckily, though they may not often make the bestseller lists, excellent popular science and SF books continue to be produced. There was a time when it was suggested such 'midlist' books were dying out because everything would either be blockbusters or self-published to an audience of three. Thankfully, that has not happened, in part due to the translation market, as many good English language popular science books do well in other languages (and to some extent vice versa).

So I wish you a happy Christmas if you celebrate it, and a great New Year - and look forward to reading many excellent books in 2023.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more