Posted September 19, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News, Rob Brotherton
Bad News is surprisingly full of good news, in fact. Although the subtitle makes it sound like this is all about “fake news”, that’s not quite the truth. The book focuses on the news in general, reasoning that to understand the problem of fake news, you must first understand what the news is and what we hope to get out of it. Fair enough, and Brotherton explains clearly various bits of research around the news and covers the history of how we’ve responded to the news.
The news is generally good, in fact: most people aren’t in filter bubbles, says the research; most people aren’t taken in by fake news, or so it seems in studies; partisan effects are there but less than you’d guess; people are able to take on board new information.
Which leaves me wondering why the online experience is so different, where it’s abundantly clear that people do believe absolutely bonkers things from fringe websites. Are those people not reached by the studies, and thus the studies inherently contain some bias? Is the online community just one of those examples where you only hear the squeaky wheels, and gosh, they squeak loudly? No conclusions here, just wondering.
Brotherton’s book is a surprisingly quick read, and surprisingly optimistic. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, Rob Brotherton
Posted September 16, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Slime: A Natural History, Susanne Wedlich, trans. Ayca Türkoglu
Slime: A Natural History is a very readable book. Often with translated works, I can tell that they’re translated, but this translator is very good at making the book feel chatty and colloquial. It slips by really quickly, with the author’s enthusiasm for the topic shining through.
However, it doesn’t quite feel organised. Although the chapters are arranged into sections by theme, it feels very “and another thing, and another thing, and another thing” — a pile of facts that doesn’t really cohere into a structure. I also thought that the human “fear” of slime was a bit over-egged. Sure, there are times when slime is very gross and touching it would be aversive, and there are horror films which use that grossness as part of the fever-pitch of emotion, but I don’t find slime inherently frightening.
Still, an enjoyable read, and I learned some interesting things!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Susanne Wedlich
Posted September 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Possibility of Life, Jaime Green
The Possibility of Life looks to both science and science fiction for an idea of humanity’s hopes, dreams and fears of what alien life might look like, how realistic that might be, and what it’s based on. If you’re an SF/F fan, you’ll probably recognise a lot of the references, and not just the old white men or the hit TV series of SF either: Ursula Le Guin and N.K. Jemisin are here too.
I found it very readable, and thought Green presents the scientific facts (such as they are) very well. The enthusiasm for the subject is palpable, and optimistic, but doesn’t over-egg it (we’re probably not five minutes from meeting a Vulcan or Cardassian).
Nothing too surprising for me, but I enjoyed the approach to the subject.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jaime Green, non-fiction, science, SF/F
Posted September 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
Mother Tongue, Jenni Nuttall
I was worried this would come off rather gender essentialist, and there were a few points that did raise eyebrows — Nuttall is very certain of her “we” when referring to various experiences that she attributes to “being female”, and though she didn’t say anything outright trans/enby-phobic, I was conscious that there was kind of a miasma of scepticism about the increase in gender-neutral language.
There was a lot of interesting stuff in here, but I found her style a bit tedious, and at times she really wasn’t clear. For example, she talked about the Latin version of the Bible and made it sound almost like it was originally written in Latin (it wasn’t). I’m pretty sure that’s because she was talking about a translation being done from Latin to the vernacular, with the translators using the Latin instead of the original, but… mm. It just all felt a little woolly to someone who was noticing what was said. There’s simplifying it for a lay audience, and there’s making it sound like the original version of the New Testament was in Latin.
(This may of course be mostly my own reading, and if I read it again it’d seem perfectly clear. Maybe. But on first read, I raised my eyebrows. That suggests a lack of clarity!)
As far as notes go, they are very, very scanty. A whole chapter has two endnotes, for example. What are the sources for literally everything else? Who knows.
All in all, I’m inclined to suggest steering away from this one, now that I’ve sat down and thought it through. Unearthing the words female-bodied people have used about themselves is a worthy plan, but if a whole chapter has only two notes, then… nah.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction
Posted September 3, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
An Immense World, Ed Yong
I remember really liking Yong’s previous book about microbes, and this didn’t disappoint — despite being a whole new topic! The best pop-science, for me, is the stuff that makes me constantly want to tell someone about the neat things I’m learning. That was definitely the case here: I was texting my mum from the discharge ward after a minor surgery to tell her about the eyes of scallops!
Yong writes clearly and with lots and lots of examples. Now and then I didn’t care much for the metaphors, as in the introduction — just get down to the actual science, pleeeease. I also got a bit overloaded by all the footnotes. But for the most part, it was really readable and fascinating. There are a lot of references and so on in the back, and Yong is careful not to claim too much for any fascinating theories, making it clear when things are fully understood and when they aren’t. (At least, to the best of our knowledge.)
Animal senses really aren’t my main interest, but Yong writes engagingly enough — and the topic is fascinating enough — that it really doesn’t matter.
Definitely recommended, if your interest is piqued.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Ed Yong, non-fiction, science
Posted August 25, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Lives of the Ancient Egyptians, Toby Wilkinson
Lives of the Ancient Eygptians is not a particularly surprising book, if you’ve read about ancient Egypt in popular history books for a while, but it does take an interesting perspective: the span of ancient Egyptian history, represented as best as possible through the lives of 100 Egyptians.
That’s not many to do a lot of work, and sometimes they kind of clump together (Hatshepsut, and also people who worked for her, and also her family members), but mostly it manages to pick out — where possible — a range of people, including the poorer people who we have less evidence about.
In the end, it’s quite a simple version of Egyptian history, and there are many fascinating, controversial and enlightening facts and people passed over. Such a choice of format will always disappoint someone. I found it mildly entertaining and fairly readable, though Wilkinson is not (for me personally, at least) the most engaging writer. I don’t know what it is about his writing, but reliably, I find my attention drifting. Oops.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Toby Wilkinson
Posted August 22, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Flaws of Nature, Andy Dobson
Flaws of Nature is about the weird stuff that happens due to evolution — the famous cases where an organism is far from perfectly designed, like the long nerve in the necks of giraffes, or the fact that dolphins and whales can’t actually breathe underwater (which seems like a bit of a drawback, even if they have a workaround and things seem to work out for them). It’s not just a litany of interesting facts, though: instead Dobson’s interested in why and how this stuff might evolve this way.
For the most part, this is explained accessibly, through examples and a little bit of math. Nothing I struggled with, and I’m not great with figures, so definitely still accessible to a layperson. And there are some interesting random facts among all of those examples (the multiple jaws of fish were new to me; I thought that was unique to morays).
One thing that irritated me quite a bit was the constant footnotes, and the format of them. *** and **** aren’t sufficiently different to make it swiftly obvious which footnote I want to look at: numbers would be much, much better.
Overall, it seemed pretty solid to me, if obviously sometimes rather simplifying matters. It has a bibliography which looks fairly thorough, albeit not numbered references. I found it interesting.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Andy Dobson, book reviews, books, non-fiction, science
Posted August 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Martin Edwards
This book can be a little difficult to read for any kind of extended period, because it’s basically a list of books, with each themed chapter prefaced by more books that aren’t part of the 100 list but are giving context to the list of 100. There’s a lot going on.
That said, it’s a really valuable resource if you’re interested in classic crime: some of the books are republished in the British Library Crime Classics series (edited by the author of this book), but many are not, and some are still easily available — making this a lovely way to pad out your wishlist.
So, not a super readable book, but a valuable one to have. Edwards tries not to totally spoil the stories, by the way, but if you don’t like having clues for mystery novels, this is best skipped.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, non-fiction
Posted July 31, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Good Virus, Tom Ireland
This is one of those popular science books that got me excited by teaching me new things — something that you wouldn’t think is easy when it comes to things like viruses, which I’m studying during my MSc at LSHTM. The “good viruses” of the title are bacteriophages, though: viruses that specifically target bacteria as their natural hosts, and surprisingly little is sad about those when you’re studying viruses in general, despite the fact that — as Ireland makes clear — they’re absolutely ubiquitous. If anything rules the world by sheer numbers, it’s bacteriophages, and they’re absolutely everywhere, from the icecaps to the deep ocean to the human body.
It’s likely that Ireland is a little hyperbolic at times here about the potentials of bacteriophages, though he does sound a note of caution here and there about his own enthusiasm. But it’s also true that bacteriophages offer us some answers to knotty problems, like antimicrobial resistance, and we’d be stupid to keep turning away. I had no idea that bacteriophages were being used to treat bacterial infections in clinics in places like Georgia, and I had no idea that “the West” was so pathetically behind and completely unable to legislate in ways that would make clinical trials possible. It’s exciting, and vital, and I have so many questions about why we’re not in a hurry to do more.
If you’re in my position, where you study this stuff, then obviously this book — absolutely riveting as I found it — isn’t the end: you’ll need to read papers, ask further questions, and maybe get in the lab. But as a starting point, it’s a good read, informative and enthusiastic, and full of titbits I couldn’t wait to share with… well. More or less everyone who stayed within earshot for long enough, actually.
This is the best kind of popular science, shining a light on something that is wrongly obscure, and it has plenty of resources in the footnotes to guide you to where the info comes from. (That said, more footnotes would’ve been good. I wasn’t always happy with statements that didn’t have references.)
So glad I picked this up.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Tom Ireland
Posted July 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging, Michael Bond
Michael Bond discusses fandom with an amount of sympathy that I found a little surprising, since (as a member of multiple fandoms) I’ve experienced a fair bit of hostility to that type/level of nerdery. Even when it comes to furries and otherkin, the tone is sympathetic, and he honours their identities by referring to them in the way they want to be referred to.
Nothing in this book was terribly surprising to me, nor did it really constitute a description of rigorous research — it comes out more like a collection of fandom-related anecdotes and explanations, highlighting the experiences of some fans and describing what fandom can be like (e.g. Jane Austen fandom, or Michael Jackson fandom). It touches on some dark stuff, like being a fan of Michael Jackson despite the accusations made against him, and especially the stuff about fans of serial killers and mass murderers… but it maintains a pretty light, non-judgemental tone.
It basically mildly puts across the message that fandom is enriching for many people, even restorative, and can help you find your “people”. I think most fans could tell you that!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Michael Bond, non-fiction
