Not a mathematics-is-fun romp but a serious, persuasive effort to describe how its discoveries paralleled human progress.
A more or less chronological history and compelling case that advances in mathematics provided the foundation for the advance of civilization.
Quantum physicist Brooks, author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time, points out that numbers do not come naturally to humans. Ancient and remote communities could identify one, two, and three, but everything beyond is simply “many.” This is not stupidity but evolution; larger numbers weren’t necessary for their survival. Matters changed when we began to gather in large numbers and exchange goods; counting became essential. Ancient mathematics was clunky, but humans are good at problem-solving, so they achieved feats such as predicting eclipses, building complex structures, and measuring the Earth. Contrary to popular belief, the Middle Ages was a golden age for numbers, and a fiercely controversial concept—the negative number—entered the mainstream. Greeks and Romans did fine without a zero, but contemporary culture needs it, and eighth-century Persian mathematicians were vital to the development of algebra. Imaginary numbers are not imaginary at all; modern engineers could not calculate without them. Brooks proposes that the acceleration of change began around 1500 with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, a way of ensuring that no errors crept into accounting. Before that, all trade was personal. Afterward, commerce exploded because there was “no more taking the owner’s word for it, or trusting the family name.” An unabashed lover of mathematics, Brooks refuses to take the traditional pop writer’s pledge to eschew equations. Most readers will follow his description of ancient navigation across the Mediterranean and the birth of linear perspective in Renaissance Italy, but when he turns his attention to calculus, logarithms, statistics, and cryptography, there is no shortage of complex equations. Some readers will flinch, but those who power through will be rewarded.
Not a mathematics-is-fun romp but a serious, persuasive effort to describe how its discoveries paralleled human progress.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4899-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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