Readers interested in the hidden workings of the world will be well pleased with Minshall’s explorations.
Diving into manufacturing and the modern supply chain.
“Throughout every day of your life you will be wearing, consuming, being transported or sheltered by, communicating through or being restored to health by manufactured products,” writes Cambridge University scholar Minshall. Yet, he adds, how these products come into being is “largely invisible” to most consumers. Minshall aims to make at least some of the processes visible, and he uses everyday objects to illustrate their complexities. One is toilet paper, which, at a basic level, requires different kinds of wood pulped and then glued together and cut onto rolls at the rate of 14,000 rolls an hour, then serviced by an army of haulers, shippers, clerks, data analysts, and logistics specialists until it arrives on the shelf: “The whole system to make this product requires the brains and brawn of thousands of workers, millions of dollars of investment and the movement of materials and partly finished goods over thousands of miles.” That this product is so essential, Minshall adds in passing, explains the perfectly rational hoarding of toilet paper that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which in turn exposed the many snags inherent in the supply chain, another subject on which he sheds useful light. Move from toilet paper to a more complex product, and the obstacles multiply by orders of magnitude; who knew how many countries were involved in the production of an Airbus-320 plane, all of whose parts—ideally—are perfectly made and assembled? Moving wings from Wales, landing gear from Canada, horizontal tailplanes from Spain, and so forth to the central assembly plant in France involves a massive carbon footprint, and Minshall concludes his illuminating study with how manufacturing might be more efficient and environmentally friendly, in part by keeping at least some of it as local as possible.
Readers interested in the hidden workings of the world will be well pleased with Minshall’s explorations.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063434653
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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