Genre: Science

Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

Posted November 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

The Secret Life of the Owl

by John Lewis-Stempel

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 88
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

‘Dusk is filling the valley. It is the time of the gloaming, the owl-light.
Out in the wood, the resident tawny has started calling, Hoo-hoo-hoo-h-o-o-o.’

There is something about owls. They feature in every major culture from the Stone Age onwards. They are creatures of the night, and thus of magic. They are the birds of ill-tidings, the avian messengers from the Other Side. But owls – with the sapient flatness of their faces, their big, round eyes, their paternal expressions – are also reassuringly familiar. We see them as wise, like Athena’s owl, and loyal, like Harry Potter's Hedwig. Human-like, in other words. No other species has so captivated us.

In The Secret Life of the Owl, John Lewis-Stempel explores the legends and history of the owl. And in vivid, lyrical prose, he celebrates all the realities of this magnificent creature, whose natural powers are as fantastic as any myth.

John Lewis-Stempel’s The Secret Life of the Owl is a bit of a miscellany covering all things owl, mostly focused on owls in the UK. It’s a quick read, less than 90 pages, and includes profiles of the owls that live in or visit the UK, and a bit of an examination of how owls fit into our landscape — both how we react to them, and how other British birds react to them. As such, there are a few poems quoted throughout, in and amongst the facts and figures, and a couple of black-and-white illustrations.

It did feel a little disorganised to me, like Lewis-Stempel was just pouring out anything he could think of about owls. The enthusiasm is endearing, as is the description of his personal fascination with owls, and his interactions with them. Even though it felt a bit badly organised, it was in the way that information can be disorganised when someone is passionately telling you about a pet topic, which I didn’t really mind.

I don’t feel like I knew a lot about owls before reading, other than some vague bits that filter through popular culture, plus a lifetime of living with intelligent people who watch and discuss documentaries and read this kind of book. I learned a few new things from this book, though I don’t know how much I’ll retain — either way, it was fun.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Overleaf

Posted November 12, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Overleaf

Overleaf: An Album of British Trees

by Susan Ogilvy, Richard Ogilvy

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 176
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Leaves live a thankless life. They go unnoticed while providing shade and cleaning the air, and are often the subject of our groans and grumbles in the fall while being raked away. Outside of brief odes to colorful autumn foliage, their quiet, everyday beauty is usually unsung.

Overleaf is an extraordinary celebration of that most obvious and overlooked part of a tree. It features over seventy brilliantly rendered studies of the leaves of thirty-seven tree species found across North America and Europe. Susan Ogilvy's paintings are lovely and uncluttered, resembling real-life pressings captured between the pages. The artwork is accompanied by Richard Ogilvy's thought-provoking text, which provides a vignette for each tree that explores its particular relationship with the environment, its style of growth, the history and mythology surrounding it, and the uses that birds, insects, and humans make of it. He reflects on the detailed complexity of our woodlands and forests and thoughtfully explores our place among them. Just as individual leaves create a cohesive shade, the range of these portraits provides a compelling vision of our relationship with trees. Overleaf is a thoughtful collection that will have readers taking a second look at the world above.

Overleaf is a fascinating collaboration between Susan Ogilvy, a botanical painter, and her brother-in-law, a forester. Each tree is illustrated by its leaf, showing the top side of the leaf on one page and then on the reverse side, the back of the leaf. They seem to be roughly to scale, and beautifully detailed; they aren’t the platonic ideal of each leaf, either, but a realistic one, probably based on a specific leaf, showing details of blight, galls and insect companions.

Richard’s contribution is the text, which for each tree is a handful of paragraphs talking about where the trees are found, their functions in the landscape, and some of the uses we’ve made of them and stories we’ve built around them. He explains some of the features in the images, pointing out the galls and associated other creatures, which ties the images and text together.

It’s a fascinating endeavour; it can’t really be used to identify the trees, since it contains only their leaves, but it’s an interesting compendium of detail and folklore.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Plants: From Roots to Riches

Posted November 7, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Plants: From Roots to Riches

Plants: From Roots to Riches

by Kathy Willis, Carolyn Fry

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Our obsession with plants and gardening goes back a long way and Plants: From Roots to Riches takes us to where it all began. Taking a journey through the scientific life of a uniquely British institution across 25 vivid chapters, this book explores how the last 250 years have transformed our relationship with plants for good.

Based on Radio 4’s landmark series, Kathy Willis, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Carolyn Fry, the acclaimed science writer, will take us from the birth of modern botany right through to the modern day. Delving into Kew’s archive and its world-class collections – including the Herbarium with over 7.5 million preserved plant specimens – they start with Carl Linnaeus and his invention of a universal language to name plants, through Joseph Banks’ exotic discoveries and how Charles Darwin’s fascination with orchids helped convince doubters about evolution. And as the British Empire painted the atlas red, explorers, adventurers and scientists risked their lives to bring the most interesting plant specimens and information back to London, and to Kew. From the lucrative races to control rubber, quinine and coffee to understanding the causes of the potato famine, the science of plants has taught us fascinating and enormously valuable lessons.

Full of amazing images from the archives, (some never reproduced before) and packed with history, science, memorable tales of adventure and discovery, politics and conflict, changing economic and social preoccupations, each chapter tells a unique and fascinating story, but, gathered together, a great picture unfolds, of the development of a most remarkable science, the magic and beauty of plants and ultimately our dependency on them.

Plants: From Roots to Riches is based on a series that was on Radio 4, written by Kathy Willis and Carolyn Fry. I never caught the radio version, but the book version is well-organised into a bunch of pretty bitesize chapters, following the development of botany as a modern science through the lens of Kew Gardens. It has some illustrations, though the colour plates seem quite muted and faded (not sure if this was always so or whether it was the age of the book — it’s a library book).

I don’t think it goes into enormous depth, so if this is your pet topic then likely there isn’t much new for you here, but it was an enjoyable read for me. The focus on Kew and the part Kew has played in the development of botany helped to focus things, and because of the various characters that have been historically involved with Kew, added a bit of human interest too (though none of them seem totally eccentric, alas).

It was a surprisingly fast read, I think because it is basically skimming the surface in a radio-friendly way. I learned some things, but nothing that terribly surprised me.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy

Posted October 25, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens -- And Ourselves

by Arik Kershenbaum

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

We are unprepared for the greatest discovery of modern science. Scientists are confident that there is alien life across the universe yet we have not moved beyond our perception of 'aliens' as Hollywood stereotypes. The time has come to abandon our fixation on alien monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing.

Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like. This is the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space.

The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Arik Kershenbaum, attempts to guess what alien life might look like by working from what we know. It seems to generally be focused on the more exciting side of things, with what alien animals might look like, and especially what alien intelligence might look like — though I think simpler life (equivalent to bacteria and archaea) is more likely to be found in a variety of places, with multicellular life being rarer, and intelligent life rarer still. But obviously you have to go with what people are interested in, and zoology isn’t known for in-depth interest in microbiology anyway.

As I’ve said elsewhere (and it’s not too surprising), overall there weren’t many surprises for me, given I have a biology degree and a pre-existing interest in astrobiology from fiction and non-fiction. I found that I didn’t always agree with Kershenbaum’s reasoning, but it was interesting.

As far as his reasoning went, I felt that he focused a bit too much on positive selection of beneficial traits, and it felt like he over-emphasised the idea that traits (both physical and behavioural) must be advantageous in order to be maintained through generations. Of course, that’s a large part of it, but neutral traits and behaviours can come along for the ride because they’re not selected against (and of course negative traits can come along because they’re advantageous in narrow but important circumstances, though he does touch on this in discussing traits that demonstrate fitness).

To explain what I mean, I’d be very wary of claiming that there must be an evolutionary advantage to, say, a percentage of the population being attracted to very young children — but that is a persistent trait of humans, unfortunately. If it has a grounds in heredity, then it must be either a trait that’s neutral, evolutionarily speaking, or one which is positive under a narrow set of circumstances — which it may well be, but do we really want to sit around debating how paedophilia might be good, actually? I don’t think it’s terribly appropriate to consider paedophilia to be necessarily adaptive because it’s a behaviour that exists (and persists), and likewise there are other features of appearance, behaviour and function that are complicated. Other types of child abuse, for instance.

Reckoning with something so heavy is beyond the scope of the book, but hopefully that makes it clear that it’s not a great idea to put all your faith in the idea that every trait must be adaptive. It’s important to remember the existence of negative and neutral traits which come along for the ride.

My other quibbles are related: one would be that Kershenbaum spent quite a lot of words on suggesting innovative and strange forms life might take, only to conclude quickly that no, they’re not likely, and most likely we’ll meet lifeforms that look quite like us.

The other is the stupid “tape of life” analogy. We cannot “rewind the tape of life”, so we cannot know whether things would turn out the same if we did so. (Plus a tape is a bad analogy for what they actually mean: no matter how you rewind it, it’s still going to play the same content when you press play, because a tape has pre-determined content on it.) It’s a thought experiment, not a truth about the world. I believe there have been some experiments that try to test the theory by sampling from a colony of bacteria at the same time and seeing whether each then develops in the same way — but then talk about those, instead, and what they mean for your theory, don’t just take “the tape of life” metaphor and run with it despite its manifest flaws. It’s a thought experiment, not a fact.

Obviously I’m being pretty nitpicky here, and overall I found it interesting and enjoyable (if sometimes a bit repetitive). For a layperson, it’s probably a perfectly fine level of simplification.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Precious

Posted October 20, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Precious

Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time

by Helen Molesworth

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 316
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Travelling through moments in history and layers of soil and sediment, this is world history as you have never seen it before.

This is the story of precious gems, from emeralds and rubies, to sapphires and pearls. Explore their history and geology, as well as their famous owners, from Elizabeth 1 to Elizabeth Taylor, Marie Antoinette to Marilyn Monroe, Coco Chanel to Beyonce.

Discover the fragile emerald watch that survived cross-continental journeys and centuries under the floorboards of a London house.

Journey back through the generations of women who wore pearls as a signifier of femininity and marvel at the role these glistening objects have played in changing depictions of feminism.

Learn of the Burmese warriors who believed so strongly in the connection between rubies and lifeblood that they embedded them into their skin before battle to protect them from harm.

In this sumptuous and sweeping history of humanity's love affair with jewels, the V&A’s Senior Jewellery Curator, Helen Molesworth, takes you behind the curtain of museums and auction houses, showcasing some of history's most incredible and iconic jewels and the deeply human stories that lie behind them.

Helen Molesworth obviously loves jewels, and discusses some of the very famous ones she’s had the chance to handle during her career in Precious: The History and Mystery of Gems Across Time. While ostensibly a history of gemstones, it’s also quite personal, with Molesworth discussing her connection to the gems or places where gems are mined, and making her experience quite clear. She’s handled So-And-So’s very famous jewels, you know! And these ones too!

I wasn’t so interested in her autobiography through gems, but where she does discuss the formation of gems and the history of how we’ve seen and used gems, it is interesting. And it’s not that I necessarily dislike someone having a personal connection to the topics they write about, and learning from someone’s experience can be interesting — it just feels like there’s a lot of namedropping, both of famous people and famous gems.

It was definitely a more satisfying read than Lapidarium (Hettie Judah) and went a bit more in depth. I found it compelling enough to read it quite quickly — really, it’s mostly in retrospect I’m rolling my eyes a little at the namedropping.

One good feature is the two sets of colour pages showing off photos of the gems. That helps, as I’ve never been that interested, and thus hadn’t seen some of the famous pieces described before. It gives a bit of context.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Cyborg

Posted October 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Cyborg

Cyborg

by Laura Forlano, Danya Glabau

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 222
Series: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Forlano and Glabau offer critical cyborg literacy as a way of thinking through questions about the relationship between humanity and technology in areas such as engineering and computing, art and design, and health care and medicine, as well as the social sciences and humanities. Cyborg examines whether modern technologies make us all cyborgs — if we consider, for instance, the fact that we use daily technologies at work, have technologies embedded into our bodies in health care applications, or use technology to critically explore possibilities as artists, designers, activists, and creators. Lastly, Cyborg offers perspectives from critical race, feminist, and disability thinkers to help chart a path forward for cyborg theory in the twenty-first century.

This introduction to cyborg theory provides a critical vantage point for analyzing the claims around emerging technologies like automation, robots, and AI. Cyborg analyzes and reframes popular and scholarly conversations about cyborgs from the perspective of feminist cyborg theory. Drawing on their combined decades of training, teaching, and research in the social sciences, design, and engineering education, Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau introduce an approach called critical cyborg literacy. Critical cyborg literacy foregrounds power dynamics and pays attention to the ways that social and cultural factors such as gender, race, and disability shape how technology is imagined, developed, used, and resisted.

A concise introduction to cyborg theory that examines the way in which technology is situated, political, and embodied.

Danya Glabau and Laura Forlano’s Cyborg is not really about the sci-fi concept of being a cyborg. It’s a bit more down-to-earth and in the present, looking at the roles of low-paid workers and the risk of being replaced by (or at least forced to work with machines), and also the situation that people with disabilities are in with using prosthetics, reliant on technology that could suddenly stop working, etc. It’s an accessible introduction to “cyborg theory”, though it feels like reading very academic literary theory in some of the language choices, which makes it a tad less accessible. (Although I have my MA, I am not a great fan of reading literary theory.)

It does briefly touch on cyborgs in fiction, mentioning Seven of Nine but nothing more up to date, and basically dismissing Seven of Nine as not being really useful to discuss cyborg theory. I think it might behoove them to go a bit further than Star Trek: Voyager, which finished over a decade ago at this point. Characters like Ann Leckie’s Breq and Martha Wells’ Murderbot are relevant, I think, and have a lot to engage with even if you agree that Seven of Nine isn’t a worthwhile locus for discussion about the concept of cyborgs. There’s a lot of very recent fiction with very thoughtful things to say about the line between humans and machines, and when you know that, it feels a bit disingenuous to go no further than Seven of Nine.

That said, also entirely possible that they don’t really know anything about modern SF writing, and seriously think that Seven of Nine is where it’s at. A lot of people don’t consider SF “serious enough”. So I’m not saying it’s necessarily deliberate as an omission (nor that they should definitely have looked at Murderbot and Breq in particular). It’s just telling when someone uses such an out of date reference point and acts like that says something important.

That all sounds pretty critical, but I did find this interesting, slim though it is.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – All That Remains

Posted October 6, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – All That Remains

All That Remains: A Life In Death

by Sue Black

Genres: Memoir, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 368
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

Sue Black confronts death every day. As a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and examining what her life and work has taught her.

Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue's book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel.

Sue Black’s All that Remains is more personal than her other book, Written in Bone. Much of it still discusses her work as a forensic anthropologist, but it also discusses her early experiences of death, discusses a bit about how she can see horrors and compartmentalise them away from the rest of her life, and talks about how she views death personally, and how she’d like to die.

Throughout, her writing is straight-forward, unflinching from gory details, but clinical. In every case, you get the sense of Black’s respect for people, no matter who they are, where they come from, and the details of their lives: if you had to be identified in this way by someone, you’d hope it was her.

Her attitude to death is one that I’d like to internalise more, being an anxiety-ridden mess about all things that touch on death (thanks, trauma). Her work makes for difficult reading in some ways, but her straightforward, unfearing attitude alongside her respect helped me see things more her way (at least for a while). I cried at some of the stories here (stories about her own family, stories about her time in Kosovo, etc), but not in a bad way. One should feel moved by this kind of thing.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – Around the Ocean in 80 Fish and Other Sea Life

Posted September 23, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Around the Ocean in 80 Fish and Other Sea Life

Around the Ocean in 80 Fish & Other Sea Life

by Helen Scales, Marcel George

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 216
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

This is an inspiring tour of the world's oceans and 80 of its most notable inhabitants. Beautifully illustrated, the book includes fascinating stories of the fish, shellfish and other sea life that have somehow impacted human life - whether in our medicine, culture or folklore - in often surprising and unexpected ways.

Around the Ocean in 80 Fish and Other Sea Life is in the same format as Jonathan Drori’s books about plants and trees, but has a different author (Helen Scales) and a different artist (Marcel George). Ocean life isn’t entirely my thing, but nor are plants and trees: what matters is the enthusiasm of the author — and in this case, the beautiful illustrations, which aren’t always just of the animal in question, but an interpretation of how humans have interacted with it or legends around it.

The amount of life in the ocean is so immensely rich that you could miss out everybody’s favourites and still have 80 creatures, so it’s hard to say whether the choices are right or wrong, though my prediction is that almost everyone will have a question about some preferred animal that has been neglected. Scales includes some striking stories and some very curious creatures, and the illustrations are (as I expected from this series) really beautiful. There’s no overarching narrative here — one could dip in and out easily, turn to random pages, etc, etc. I read it cover to cover in that order, as is my wont.

As ever, it highlights the effects humans are having on marine life. Many of the creatures discussed are endangered, or have at the very least had their environment affected by humans in some way or another. Scales doesn’t linger on it to a depressing extent, especially as each segment is so short, but it’s unavoidable to notice it in the aggregate.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Invisible Friends

Posted September 14, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Invisible Friends

Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us

by Jake M. Robinson

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

As we continue to live through a pandemic, all eyes are on microbes: an imperceptible and pervasive threat that hangs heavy on the air and clings to surfaces. But the reality of micro-organisms is far more diverse and life-sustaining than such a notion would have us believe (hence the title of this book). Not only are they omnipresent, but we are highly attuned to their workings - both in the world at large and right here within our own bodies. Meanwhile, cutting-edge microbiome research is changing our understanding of reality, challenging fundamental concepts of free will and individuality. Threaded through everything are microbes: the very glue that holds ecosystems together.

This topical, engaging and original book counters the prevailing narrative of microbes as the bane of society, along the way providing much-needed clarity on the overwhelmingly beneficial role they play. We discover how the microbiome is highly relevant to environmental and social equity issues, while there's also discussion about how microbes may influence our decisions: even the way we think about how we think may need to be revisited. Invisible Friends introduces the reader to a vast, pullulating cohort of minute life - friends you never knew you had.

Jake M. Robinson’s Invisible Friends is a fairly basic discussion of microbes and what they do — how they don’t just make us sick, but also influence how we feel through their influence on our guts, immune systems and more. It really is very, very basic though, touching only lightly on important topics like antibiotic resistance, and extremely lightly on what we might do about that, barely giving half a page to the potential of bacteriophages. Which is a shame, because we need to move toward using methods like bacteriophages, and for that people need to know more about them and not be afraid of them. (Check out Tom Ireland’s The Good Virus, to that end.)

I know that I’m not exactly the target audience for this book, given my background knowledge and interests even before I started doing an MSc in this stuff, but it still felt excessively simplistic. Really, it seemed like a vehicle for Robinson to tell people to spend more time outside and stop being so germophobic.

It’s true that that’d be good for us, and he’s not wrong about the impact of city living on the human microbiome, nor about the potential benefits of trying to fix that. It’s just that sometimes it begins to feel like he’s self-aggrandising, discussing this project or that that he’s been involved with that aims to improve this or that in order to, you’ve guessed it, improve people’s exposure to microbes in the city environment. We also hear repeatedly about the fact that he’s writing the thing outside in a forest. He does at least touch on the fact that there is some serious inequality in ability to access natural landscapes, at least on an economic level, which is good. (He doesn’t discuss accessibility issues of other kinds other than location and money, though.)

Anyway, I know I’m a harsh judge of this kind of thing, but I’m perfectly capable of enjoying a good book aimed at laypeople for being clear and precise in communication, even when it’s the basics — like Philipp Dettmer’s Immune — so I don’t think it’s just that.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – They Were Here Before Us

Posted September 2, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – They Were Here Before Us

They Were Here Before Us: Stories from Our First Million Years

by Ran Barkai, Eyal Halfon

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 208
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

An epic and highly readable investigation into our very earliest ancestors, focusing on the land corridor thorough which humans passed from Africa to Europe and the evidence left behind of their lives and deaths, struggles and beliefs.

This is not a book about archaeological sites. We shall come across flint tools, bones, skulls, surprising structures, and layers of earth that we can date to different periods—but they are not the heart of the matter. This book is about us, human beings, and about our place in the world. About what we have done, where we came from, which other humans used to be here, why they are no longer with us, and how and why our lives have changed. It’s also about where we went wrong. What did early humans do because they had no choice and what is the price we paying for this now?

Taking as the focus ten sites in Israel, the land corridor through which the human species passed on its journey from Africa to Europe, the story ranges far and wide from France, Spain, Turkey and Georgia to Morocco and South Africa, North America, Columbia and Peru. The authors follow the footsteps of our ancestors, describing the tools they used, the animals they hunted and the monuments they built. Fascinating revelations include:

- The earliest evidence of human use of fire;
- The meaning of cave art and the transformative effect of touching rock;
- The woman for whom 90 tortoises were sacrificed;
- What happened in the Levant following the disappearance of elephants;
- The monumental tower built at the lowest place on earth;
- Why we should envy modern hunter-gatherers – and much more ...

This provocative and panoramic book shows readers what they can learn from their ancestors, and how the unwavering ability of prehistoric people to survive and thrive can continue into the present.

There isn’t much in Eyal Halfon and Ran Barkai’s They Were Here Before Us that will come as much of a surprise if you’re already familiar with the stories of humanity’s origin, though they do mention a few new-to-me theories and go into some of the history of how things were discovered which I didn’t know. The broad strokes are familiar, but they write very clearly and explain things well. At times there’s a touch of the travelogue, because they describe visiting various of the sites as part of giving their context, but it’s not the main point of the narrative.

They do some imaginative reconstruction in the course of this, trying to figure out why people might have put a swan’s wing here or built a tower there, but I felt like they didn’t go wild: they presented these ideas as theories, as a way of understanding the data, and it’s pretty clear when they’re guessing and when they’re stating a fact.

The book doesn’t have numbered references, but it does have a solid bibliography including both books and papers, most of which look reasonably well-related to the topic to my eye (though this isn’t my field).

I found it enjoyable, and the translation (by Eylon Levy) is very readable.

Rating: 4/5

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