Tag: non-fiction

Review – Utopia for Realists

Posted September 20, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Utopia for Realists, Rutger Brenman

Utopia for Realists set out the case for three major things which would build a better world, a utopia in which we not only have unprecedented prosperity but that prosperity is more evenly shared, and people do worthwhile work:

A shorter workweek
Universal basic income
Open borders

As far as I can tell, Brenman has his facts in order, citing studies and real-world circumstances which support the suggestions he makes. Giving homeless people free cash, no strings attached, seems to have a better result than any other intervention, according to the studies he cites; shorter work weeks were almost actually implemented before they slipped off the political agenda; the numbers suggest that immigration will boost economies…

There are a lot of studies mentioned and footnoted, and a lot of sources to check; I did a little digging, but not more than that. I feel like I know so little about economics that Brenman could be saying “we should dye all ducks green” in economics-ese and I would just be nodding along. He writes very convincingly (with a few slip-ups like calling people with disabilities “cripples” — hopefully something introduced by the book’s translator rather than baked into the original text) and often aligns with my own ideas and ideals, so it’s not surprising that I feel the urge to nod along.

I did have a couple of criticisms that even I noticed, though. One example was his claim that immigration doesn’t harm social cohesion… only to claim that open borders couldn’t be introduced immediately because of the impact on social cohesion. Yikes, dude. You literally just said there’s no effect, two pages before. He also explicitly mentions rejecting a study because of his own opinions on the subject, and never actually discusses the results of that study and why he would rationally put it aside. There are a couple of other bits and pieces like that — inconsistencies and eyebrow-raising moments.

He also exhorts people at the end to be idealists, after setting out his case that utopia is achievable. I see what he means — it is achievable, if his data and theories are correct, but it requires people willing to commit to it and believe it, and in the face of so much opposition that does take an idealist, not a realist. It’s still a bit of a contradition, though…

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, Rutger Brenman

Review – Digging Up Armageddon

Posted September 20, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Digging Up Armageddon, Eric H. Cline

Digging Up Armageddon discusses the archaeology of a fascinating site: Megiddo, better known as Armageddon. Alas, despite wanting to know more about the archaeology and that area of the world, I struggled a bit with Digging Up Armageddon. Much of the book involves the exact composition of the digging team in the Oriental Institute Megiddo expedition, what they said and did and complained about. It’s all relevant — it affected the excavation, and shaped the entire approach to the dig… but it overshadows the actual archaeology in this volume, leaving me hard-pressed to talk about the archaeology!

As a result, it took me quite a long time to read it. It’s best approached as a history of that specific expedition and their legacy, with some discussion of how things have changed (how they misinterpreted or outright messed things up) — it’s definitely not about the archaeology alone, though you could in theory read each alternate chapter and focus more on the archaeological side. Still, things are so entwined that personally I wouldn’t recommend it, and I have no idea how you’d follow all the names and why they’re involved without reading it all. The disagreements were sometimes a bit byzantine.

In the end, I’m glad I read it, but it wasn’t so much the kind of non-fiction I really enjoy. If you’re looking for info on that particular expedition, it’d be a great resource.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Eric H. Cline, history, non-fiction

Review – Brit(ish)

Posted September 8, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Brit(ish), Afua Hirsch

I’ve been looking for a while for something that deals with the issues of race in Britain; Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book was one answer to that, and Brit(ish) another. It’s really mostly a memoir, an examination of what being Black in the UK is like and how Hirsch had to navigate figuring out her identity. Lots of it felt familiar, as someone who spent a lot of their time as a kid furiously asserting their Welshness, while not feeling Welsh enough. Obviously any bias I faced from people when I did so was nothing like the same scale as Hirsch experienced (and probably partly just because I was stepping out of line in my very English school), and not based upon my appearance… but it means that some of her pains and frustrations in exploring her identity (and where she calls home) were familiar.

This definitely answered some of the questions I had about race in Britain — and reminded me to my shock that though a lot of the people I grew up with were the children of immigrants, they were mostly from Pakistan and India; I knew few (if any) Black people growing up… and though I can’t say I have many white friends either, I’d say I’ve got more insulated from people who don’t look like me, not less, as I grew up. Even in Cardiff — famous as a melting pot for cultures — my experience was very, very white. So there’s a whole subset of the British population that I somehow never figured into how I saw race, and all also filtered to those who could afford the fees for private school and university… which makes a hell of a lot of sense out of some of my past misconceptions.

However, I found it a bit flat to read; mostly I am not a reader of memoirs, and I wasn’t that fascinated by Afua Hirsch as a person. She does very much come from my world of private school and a good university, but even more so since she attended Oxford… and it did make me wonder sometimes what people more like her husband’s family would say about the navel-gazing.

If you’re looking for a book that delves into some of what it’s like to be Black in the UK, then yes, this will be useful. I’m glad I read it, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it — not because it presented any hard truths I lacked from elsewhere, but because I didn’t find Hirsch’s writing compelling… and I wasn’t sure about some of her forays, which felt like gawking. Did she really need to go spectate at a swingers’ club to discuss Black sexuality in Britain? Hmm.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: Afua Hirsch, book reviews, books, non-fiction

Review – Mudlarking

Posted September 5, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Mudlarking, Lara Maiklem

The term “mudlark” might be familiar to you if you read Victorian history or books set in the Victorian period: it referred to people, often children, who would pick through the mud of the River Thames in order to find valuable things people dropped or which got lost from ships docking in London. Lara Maiklem is a modern mudlark, picking through the mud not as a means of making a livelihood, but for personal interest. She is, broadly speaking, a responsible one — documenting her finds correctly when they may count as historically significant or be classed as treasure trove, and avoiding mudlarking in areas where it’s forbidden. Or so she says, at least; it’s impossible to verify that, and occasionally her “of course I won’t tell you where” attitude to “her patch” raises an eyebrow.

She writes engagingly, though any single topic is quickly lost in the flow: there are so many different objects with stories and explanations, and each chapter covers at least a dozen, from old clay pipes to pieces of Roman hypocausts to bones to Codd bottles to pins… There’s no end to what can be found in the mud of the river after each tide, and she delights in all kinds of things that many would dismiss as trash, imbuing them with stories and researching who they may have belonged to whenever she can. Obviously this book is half a work of imagination, as she tries to picture the hands that handled and lost the objects she finds.

It’s just the sort of microhistory that interests me, magpie-minded in my own way, so that shouldn’t be taken as a criticism, necessarily — and she’s not presenting herself as a historian, so I don’t mind her flights of fancy so much. She does include a bibliography, if you want to go digging yourself, though it’d take a lot of digging to figure out where any particular factoid came from, and I suspect many of her sources from over the years aren’t listed.

It’s just worth knowing that this is a bit of a ramble, and a highly personal book, rather than a historical account of the River Thames or anything of that sort. There’s a lot of history in it, but piecemeal and cracked and strewn about the place, as befits a mudlark.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Lara Maiklem, non-fiction

Review – Bigger than History

Posted September 4, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Bigger than History, Brian Fagan, Nadia Durrani

There’s nothing much surprising in Bigger than History, and in some ways it feels rather forced. I wish that knowledge didn’t have to be justified as useful for some current problem in order to receive funding and attention, and sometimes it feels like a bit of a stretch… but at the same time, it is entirely true that archaeology can shed light on the human history of reacting to changes in climate and how we’ve seen gender through history, etc — and it can be a powerful corrective to history as written by the winners. The issues mentioned are deeply important and relevant, like the discussion of the use of history to prop up misplaced nationalist pride.

It’s not a long book, so it doesn’t go into a lot of depth, but it does give a high-level view of what archaeology can tell us about those chosen topics. There are black-and-white images in most of the book, and a section of colour plates, which help to illustrate things.

Overall, glad I picked it up, but maybe I should’ve suggested it to the library instead of buying it. Not one I’ll be keeping; it’s just too slight.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Brian Fagan, history, Nadia Durrani, non-fiction

Review – Unfit for Purpose

Posted September 1, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Unfit for Purpose, Adam Hart

Unfit for Purpose expands on a familiar-sounding theme: humans evolved over millions of years for a certain set of circumstances, but in recent centuries we’ve changed how we live entirely so that the bodies that we’ve developed and the genes we carry are optimised for a hopelessly different world… and sometimes they prove to be a disadvantage. The obvious first target is body fat storage, and Adam Hart goes straight there like a bird to the nest.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but I know I’ve read better coverage of the “obesity crisis” than Adam Hart manages here. Obesity is just bad, per Hart, and though he doesn’t embrace the idea of BMI uncritically, I know I’ve read counter-arguments for several of his points. As a scientist, I probably should spend some time tracking down this info… as a person, however, this doesn’t interest me, so it’s just worth being aware of if you pick the book up. There is not even a mention of “health at every size” thinking here.

I found the other topics similarly skimmed across. It’s amazing that he managed to mention Stanley Milgram’s experiments as a key part of how our psychology makes us ill-adapted to modern life… and used only a page to discuss them, even though it’s actually a complex issue, with many critiques of Milgram’s experiments (not least the accusation, per Gina Perry’s book, that he cherry-picked his data and massaged the scenarios to get the answer he wanted).

In the end, Hart’s main point isn’t wrong. We didn’t evolve for a situation like this… but I think part of the problem is imagining that any organism ever did. Evolution broadly shapes a species, of course, but what each species is adapted to is not the current circumstances, but those of their forebears. Humans have created change on a massive scale, shaping our environments, rapidly changing the way we live and altering our interactions with other species.

Of course we’re not adapted for this. No species ever is, and we’ve sped things up so much that it becomes incredibly obvious. I found Hart’s analysis fairly obvious and high-level — which one would expect from a popular science book, of course, but even if the pop-science book doesn’t dig deep, the author should have. There were some interesting bits, but knowing there was more digging to be done on some of these topics to get a fair impression of the landscape leaves me very hesitant to uncritically believe the pictures Hart paints.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: Adam Hart, book reviews, books, non-fiction, science

Review – The Secret Life of Bones

Posted August 29, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Secret Life of Bones, Brian Switek

Brian Switek is better known, perhaps, for writing about palaeontology — and particularly dinosaurs. The Secret Life of Bone is all about a much more familiar skeleton in the closet — well, actually, it’s not even in the closet, so that’s really a bad joke. Ahem. Anyway. The point is, this book focuses mostly on human bone, though it gets there by way of our evolutionary history. Want to know how bones evolved? What bones can tell you about an individual? Freaky facts about bone growing inside soft organs? How bones are formed and reformed throughout your life? How bones fossilise?

This book is all of that, in a pretty breezy and entertaining style. It’s anecdotal, of course, as is common for popular science books — so if you have absolutely no interest at all in knowing Switek’s own thoughts, feelings and experiences, it probably won’t be for you. It makes the descriptions and explanations accessible, and I think really the thing that’s most lacking is some colour-plates to illustrate some of the skeletons he discusses from photographs.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Brian Switek, non-fiction, science

Review – The Contact Paradox

Posted August 25, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Contact Paradox, Keith Cooper

The Contact Paradox is all about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the various issues surrounding it: how are we searching? What are we looking for? Do we expect to find anything? Should we send out signals to help ET find us? How? Why haven’t we found anybody else yet? Are we looking in the right place? Etc, etc, etc. It’s mostly a good exploration of the options, though as always I find myself totally frustrated by the assumptions made on either side of the debate. As I’ve written before elsewhere, I don’t think we have enough data to speculate from. We have one dataset, Earth, and that’s all.

Not that this is the book’s fault; part of SETI is figuring out whether there is other life in the universe or not, and this stuff has to be thought out to know what we’re looking for. The book just discusses the arguments and tries to be reasonably balanced about it… it’s just that I find most of the arguments lacking, or rather, I find that they come to premature conclusions and that people’s attitudes tend to harden on their preferred end of the spectrum.

What I did really enjoy about the book is being reminded about how amazing the universe is — and how much we do understand about it. The stuff we know or can theorise about is mind-boggling in the best way.

This is popular science, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s shot through with references to popular science fiction, and even discusses the point of view of various science fiction writers. I couldn’t help but notice they were all dudes, though, and that in all the references to all kinds of science fiction, not one female author was named. Sigh and eyeroll. I’m sure there are dozens of excuses for that on the part of the author, and I’m not really interested in hearing them.

Though in terms of fiction that he could’ve referred to, I thought the author really missed a trick in not referring to the Mass Effect games, which have their own answer to Fermi’s paradox and the Great Filter.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Keith Cooper, non-fiction, science

Review – The Secret Lives of Colour

Posted July 31, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St. Clair

This was perfect for a kind of scatter-brained mood: the stories about each colour are short, and it’s easy to dip in and out. Actually, it’s better that way, since there’s some repetition here and there between the colours, and it can get a bit samey to just sit down and read multiples. It seems to be well sourced and squares up with what I know about the history of colour and optics, though admittedly that isn’t much!

I would definitely recommend reading it on a colour screen, or preferably in a physical book, where you can see the colours right beside the images. It was OK on my phone screen, but not great.

Overall, enjoyable and informative… but also kinda repetitive. Not something I’m wildly enthusiastic about, even though it came at a good time for me.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Kassia St. Clair, non-fiction

Review – The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries

Posted July 21, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries, Donald R. Prothero

This one is quite an expensive tome, so I was pleased when the library got it for me in ebook! It’s not quite as good as being able to see the full-colour, full-size illustrations, but I’m not very visual so I was here for the text anyway. I could get a quick look at the interesting ones, and that’s enough for me; I recommend experiencing it in colour, though, and probably in pbook form instead of ebook.

Overall, it was… pretty much as I’d expect, from a fairly generalised dinosaur book: there was a lot that I already knew, with some nuggets that I didn’t, and different interpretations of some fossils while trying to portray a fairly broad consensus. There are some gossipy stories about palaeontologists and work in the field, enough to give you a little taste of the conditions fossils get collected in and the history around their study.

There’s nothing particularly surprising, if you’re interested in dinosaurs and tend to pounce on books about them… but for me it was nice to wander through the Cretaceous landscapes for a while and let it wash over me. It’d be great if you were interested in dinosaurs as a kid, don’t know much about them now, and would like a refresher that brings up to date whilst being informative and fairly thorough.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Donald R. Prothero, non-fiction, science