Crush - James Riordon ***

Sometimes when reading a book, just like being in any other relationship, you have to say ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ Unfortunately, I really struggled to get on with James Riordon's eccentric take on gravity.

It's not that the main areas of the topic aren't covered. You'll find Newton and general relativity; black holes, white holes (and your kitchen sink), gravitational waves and dark matter/energy. But the approach to covering this includes surprisingly little science. Instead, Riordon skips around the topics, lacing the facts with personal observations (and even family details) touching on aspects of gravity without ever really telling us much of the scientific detail (I'm not sure if this should even be considered popular science.)

This is where the 'it's me' bit really kicks in. I like good narrative in a popular science book, though I feel there's far too much 'me' from the author in many such books of late. I read them to explore the science, not to discover family anecdotes and flit around the outskirts of the subject like intellectual moths around a streetlamp.

I'm sure there will be a big audience for whom Riordon's approach comes across as an entertaining, stimulating, informative read. But I don't know how many of them will be popular science readers. Each time a topic was introduced I thought 'now we'll get some meat', only to be disappointed. It's a bit like having a haut cuisine meal where you expect to find a lovely piece of venison under the delicious foam - only to discover that the foam is all there is to it.

Again, I'm sure it's me, but I find Riordon's jokey storytelling approach (like throwing in the kitchen sink mentioned above) just a bit too much. I can't deny there were parts I genuinely enjoyed - but often they were in little entertaining asides, which would be great if there was anything substantial for them to be aside to. So, for instance, I loved the fact that physicist William Press in 1980 calculated that humans should be no more than 2.6 centimetres tall. Or that in 2011, physicist Germain Rousseau and colleagues 'realized that there are cosmic insights to be gleaned from a kitchen sink.'

The fact is, this book and I were never going to get on. But don't let my view put you off - your relationship with it may be totally different.

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Comments

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