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 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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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