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4.19 AVERAGE
4.19 AVERAGE
funny
informative
medium-paced
“Science has got an awful lot wrong over the years. One could argue that it is, in fact, science’s job to get things wrong, as that is the place for which you can start to be less wrong and after a few rounds get things right.”
Genre: Nonfiction, Science
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Content Warnings: None that I can think of.
Explained mostly in a language that can be understood by the general public, “The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science” does its best at trying to make science accessible for all. With anecdotes and examples spread around here and there, this book is anything but monotone—something that is hard to achieve when tackling scientific writing.
Touching on subjects ranging from the concept of time (solar, atomic, circadian—measured by clocks or corals or humans) to the relativity of colors (how certain are you that the green I see is the same green you see?), this book really does try to give you countless bits and pieces of information of important science-related topics.
I personally loved the audiobook. This book is written like a conversation, and having the authors of the book read it felt more like a fun podcast rather than a heavy university textbook. Being a scientist myself, there were few things in this book that I hadn’t heard before, but I am absolutely certain that this will not be the case for everyone. And even knowing these things, I found this book incredibly entertaining.
I would highly recommend this book if you’re a science enthusiast and enjoy fun science. This book reminds me of educational videos made by ASAPScience or Crash Course in its cleverness and humor. I feel like this would be an awesome gift for senior high school students who have an interest in STEM or even adults who are generally interested in science and would like to learn more.
ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
“To us, the passing of time is not fixed. No matter how accurate a clock we can build, our experience of time is subjective and depends on our psychological state from moment to moment. (…) Experience is what colors our existence.”
Genre: Nonfiction, Science
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Content Warnings: None that I can think of.
Explained mostly in a language that can be understood by the general public, “The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science” does its best at trying to make science accessible for all. With anecdotes and examples spread around here and there, this book is anything but monotone—something that is hard to achieve when tackling scientific writing.
Touching on subjects ranging from the concept of time (solar, atomic, circadian—measured by clocks or corals or humans) to the relativity of colors (how certain are you that the green I see is the same green you see?), this book really does try to give you countless bits and pieces of information of important science-related topics.
I personally loved the audiobook. This book is written like a conversation, and having the authors of the book read it felt more like a fun podcast rather than a heavy university textbook. Being a scientist myself, there were few things in this book that I hadn’t heard before, but I am absolutely certain that this will not be the case for everyone. And even knowing these things, I found this book incredibly entertaining.
I would highly recommend this book if you’re a science enthusiast and enjoy fun science. This book reminds me of educational videos made by ASAPScience or Crash Course in its cleverness and humor. I feel like this would be an awesome gift for senior high school students who have an interest in STEM or even adults who are generally interested in science and would like to learn more.
ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
“To us, the passing of time is not fixed. No matter how accurate a clock we can build, our experience of time is subjective and depends on our psychological state from moment to moment. (…) Experience is what colors our existence.”
“Science has got an awful lot wrong over the years. One could argue that it is, in fact, science’s job to get things wrong, as that is the place for which you can start to be less wrong and after a few rounds get things right.”
Genre: Nonfiction, Science
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Content Warnings: None that I can think of.
Explained mostly in a language that can be understood by the general public, “The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science” does its best at trying to make science accessible for all. With anecdotes and examples spread around here and there, this book is anything but monotone—something that is hard to achieve when tackling scientific writing.
Touching on subjects ranging from the concept of time (solar, atomic, circadian—measured by clocks or corals or humans) to the relativity of colors (how certain are you that the green I see is the same green you see?), this book really does try to give you countless bits and pieces of information of important science-related topics.
I personally loved the audiobook. This book is written like a conversation, and having the authors of the book read it felt more like a fun podcast rather than a heavy university textbook. Being a scientist myself, there were few things in this book that I hadn’t heard before, but I am absolutely certain that this will not be the case for everyone. And even knowing these things, I found this book incredibly entertaining.
I would highly recommend this book if you’re a science enthusiast and enjoy fun science. This book reminds me of educational videos made by ASAPScience or Crash Course in its cleverness and humor. I feel like this would be an awesome gift for senior high school students who have an interest in STEM or even adults who are generally interested in science and would like to learn more.
ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
“To us, the passing of time is not fixed. No matter how accurate a clock we can build, our experience of time is subjective and depends on our psychological state from moment to moment. (…) Experience is what colors our existence.”
Genre: Nonfiction, Science
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Content Warnings: None that I can think of.
Explained mostly in a language that can be understood by the general public, “The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science” does its best at trying to make science accessible for all. With anecdotes and examples spread around here and there, this book is anything but monotone—something that is hard to achieve when tackling scientific writing.
Touching on subjects ranging from the concept of time (solar, atomic, circadian—measured by clocks or corals or humans) to the relativity of colors (how certain are you that the green I see is the same green you see?), this book really does try to give you countless bits and pieces of information of important science-related topics.
I personally loved the audiobook. This book is written like a conversation, and having the authors of the book read it felt more like a fun podcast rather than a heavy university textbook. Being a scientist myself, there were few things in this book that I hadn’t heard before, but I am absolutely certain that this will not be the case for everyone. And even knowing these things, I found this book incredibly entertaining.
I would highly recommend this book if you’re a science enthusiast and enjoy fun science. This book reminds me of educational videos made by ASAPScience or Crash Course in its cleverness and humor. I feel like this would be an awesome gift for senior high school students who have an interest in STEM or even adults who are generally interested in science and would like to learn more.
ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
“To us, the passing of time is not fixed. No matter how accurate a clock we can build, our experience of time is subjective and depends on our psychological state from moment to moment. (…) Experience is what colors our existence.”
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all time is A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it is getting on in years and could use some updating. I rather naively hoped that The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) might be a worthy spiritual successor to that volume. Both Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford have written books I have enjoyed in the past: Hello World and How to Argue With a Racist, respectively. I was delighted to be approved for this eARC through NetGalley and publisher W.W. Norton & Company. Alas, the book didn’t quite live up to my lofty expectations—and that is probably on me.
Although the title makes it sound like Rutherford and Fry are taking on the (admittedly daunting) task of explaining everything, the subtitle, Adventures in Math and Science, is a more accurate description of this book. The chapters are a meandering, sometimes unfocused exploration of topics that feel picked somewhat out of a hat, or perhaps through the authors’ interest in them. Through a mixture of history, philosophy, science, and geeky pop culture references, the authors deliver a wonderful backgrounder on the age of the universe (and how we know it), the history of measuring (and defining) time, biases in perception and cognition, human (and animal) emotions, and more.
As I said in the introduction, it’s my fault for wanting this book to be something it isn’t, so I don’t want to be too harsh on it as a result. This book does not take us through the history of life, the universe, and everything with delightful anecdotes from the scientists we meet along the way. Yes, there are delightful anecdotes, and there are also plenty of facts—I definitely learned from this book, including that Charles Darwin had a third work on evolutionary theory, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, that no one else has ever mentioned in my presence! There are plenty of allusions and stories about scientific contributions I was familiar with, as well as ones I was not.
But I just couldn’t enjoy the organization of this book. Partly, reading the eARC on a Kindle was hell because there are a bunch of sidebars that don’t get rendered properly, so halfway through a paragraph of the main text it jumps inexplicably to a different topic for three paragraphs before resuming the original topic. This isn’t the authors’ fault, but it did seem emblematic of their writing style in general, which is frenetic and conversational in a way that is meant to be approachable but doesn’t work for me. Again, I’ve enjoyed their writing separately, so I guess it’s the particular combination of their voices that didn’t work.
It’s also important to remember that any book as general and broad as this can be susceptible to mistakes. Fry is a mathematician, Rutherford a geneticist, yet they seek to explicate topics as intense as radiological dating and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and in the latter case, they actually perpetuate a common yet incorrect explanation (they repeat misconception #2 in this wonderful video from Looking Glass Universe should you be curious, which is how I recognized this explanation as incorrect). That was just a particular nuance that jumped out at me; I am sure there are more.
So in this way, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is likely going to be a big hit with some readers. It certainly has the potential to introduce you to a wide range of very interesting topics, which I hope will lead people to read more specialized books about those topics. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the writing style or how the book was organized, which made it difficult to appreciate the book as a whole. While I therefore can’t enthusiastically recommend it, I’m also not panning it either—just not my particular cup of tea, which honestly surprised me a great deal.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Although the title makes it sound like Rutherford and Fry are taking on the (admittedly daunting) task of explaining everything, the subtitle, Adventures in Math and Science, is a more accurate description of this book. The chapters are a meandering, sometimes unfocused exploration of topics that feel picked somewhat out of a hat, or perhaps through the authors’ interest in them. Through a mixture of history, philosophy, science, and geeky pop culture references, the authors deliver a wonderful backgrounder on the age of the universe (and how we know it), the history of measuring (and defining) time, biases in perception and cognition, human (and animal) emotions, and more.
As I said in the introduction, it’s my fault for wanting this book to be something it isn’t, so I don’t want to be too harsh on it as a result. This book does not take us through the history of life, the universe, and everything with delightful anecdotes from the scientists we meet along the way. Yes, there are delightful anecdotes, and there are also plenty of facts—I definitely learned from this book, including that Charles Darwin had a third work on evolutionary theory, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, that no one else has ever mentioned in my presence! There are plenty of allusions and stories about scientific contributions I was familiar with, as well as ones I was not.
But I just couldn’t enjoy the organization of this book. Partly, reading the eARC on a Kindle was hell because there are a bunch of sidebars that don’t get rendered properly, so halfway through a paragraph of the main text it jumps inexplicably to a different topic for three paragraphs before resuming the original topic. This isn’t the authors’ fault, but it did seem emblematic of their writing style in general, which is frenetic and conversational in a way that is meant to be approachable but doesn’t work for me. Again, I’ve enjoyed their writing separately, so I guess it’s the particular combination of their voices that didn’t work.
It’s also important to remember that any book as general and broad as this can be susceptible to mistakes. Fry is a mathematician, Rutherford a geneticist, yet they seek to explicate topics as intense as radiological dating and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and in the latter case, they actually perpetuate a common yet incorrect explanation (they repeat misconception #2 in this wonderful video from Looking Glass Universe should you be curious, which is how I recognized this explanation as incorrect). That was just a particular nuance that jumped out at me; I am sure there are more.
So in this way, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) is likely going to be a big hit with some readers. It certainly has the potential to introduce you to a wide range of very interesting topics, which I hope will lead people to read more specialized books about those topics. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the writing style or how the book was organized, which made it difficult to appreciate the book as a whole. While I therefore can’t enthusiastically recommend it, I’m also not panning it either—just not my particular cup of tea, which honestly surprised me a great deal.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
it’s quite a challenging, fun read. If you don’t find a particular topic interesting, or perhaps hard to grasp - you should skip it. It’s a fantastic book if you want to seem intelligent to your friends, but without going back to it every 6 months or so - to refresh your memory, you’ll very soon forget what you read. Rutherford and Fry are entertaining and captivating authors, as per.
What a great book! The breezy, informal style is exactly the type of thing that pleases me best: It didn't feel like it was trying to be funny or unstuffy or self-congratulatorily nerdy. It just was. I would like to read more by this pair (or check out their radio show or podcast) to get more of this style. The content, too, was pleasing: discussions and investigations about how we understand the universe and world, with, as far as I can tell from topics I'm more familiar with, accurate descriptions of the phenomena (if simplified) and careful acknowledgements of what's knowable and what's unknowable. The depth was necessarily curtailed, given that it was focused on breadth and accessibility, but it succeeded so well in what it set out to do, and what it set out to do was so nicely attuned to my own taste, that I am left wanting more.
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced