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sergek94's review against another edition
informative
1.0
This book is a collection of short essays written by Vaclav Smil that explore various unrelated topics. From a brief exploration of the history of bicycles, the consequences of some countries having increasingly older populations, and showing us how electricity costs us much less than it did decades ago, and some opinions such as the importance of dairy consumption and moderate meat eating not having any adverse health effects, this book has a little bit of everything.However, after having finished it, I was left without retaining much information, because the delivery was extremely dry.I should've known better before picking up a book called "Numbers Don't Lie...", and in hindsight, it isn't that surprising, but I was hoping the information would be delivered in a more digestible and interesting way. Instead, we get endless pages of facts and statistics being listed, and I was quite honestly bored.A lot of topics were simply not that interesting, especially the section regarding fuels and electricity which was an absolute slog to get through, and the ones that were of slight interest to me didn't offer any new insights, simply regurgitating facts and figures in a robotic tone. Definitely not what I like reading, so perhaps I shouldn't have picked this up to begin with.However, if facts and numbers being delivered in a relatively dry and straightforward way would not bore you, this book might be an interesting read. Bill Gates states that this book is one of his favourites, which isn't what drew me to read this, but I thought I should mention it if it is at all relevant. As for me, I will be making sure to avoid these types of books in the future, and I prefer consuming this type of information through visual media.
“Numbers may not lie, but individual perceptions of them differ.”
“Numbers may not lie, but individual perceptions of them differ.”