Compelling popular science with an ambitious underlying theme.
Two veteran science writers address a host of big concepts.
Geneticist Rutherford and mathematician Fry begin by describing a library whose books contain every possible combination of letters, spaces, commas, and periods. “Every possible” means “infinite,” so the library would fill far more than the cosmos. Infinity is a fascinating concept, vividly explained by many authors. Rutherford and Fry, however, employ it as a metaphor for the complexity of the universe, the difficulty of communication, the evolution of language, and the mechanics of Darwinian evolution. In the chapters that follow, the authors answer intriguing, if often oddball questions. What would an alien look like? Deeply unimaginative, Hollywood gives us either humanlike beings with swollen heads or “insectoid, human-sized, phallic-headed, acid-blooded, armour plated” monsters. The authors emphasize that almost all earthly life is tiny; bacteria dominate. The total mass of plants is vastly larger than that of animals. Basic science reveals that on any planet, flying creatures will have wings; living in liquid, they’ll be torpedo-shaped; on land, they’ll have legs, maybe four, six, or more. Some readers may be surprised to learn that two-legged animals are rare. Telling time seems straightforward, but it’s actually quite complicated. An earthly day is not only not 24 hours long; an average day is not 24 hours either. The sloshing of the Earth’s liquid core, the tug of the moon and planets, and even winds make the time of one earthly rotation “totally unpredictable.” Atomic clocks are the most accurate time-keepers, losing “less than a second every 15 billion years.” Throughout history, predicting the end of the world has been irresistible; surveys today reveal that 1 in 7 people think it will happen during their lifetime. After an amusing review of doomsday cults, the authors reveal the facts: The sun is slowly getting hotter and will render the Earth uninhabitable in roughly 1 billion years.
Compelling popular science with an ambitious underlying theme.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-88157-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
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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