Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich A terrifyingly topical book at this point in time. As Russian soldiers are again bringing death and destruction to a neighbour we read Alexievich’s poignant interviews with the injured, the grieving and the ones who escaped physically unharmed from […]
Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks by Chad Orzel I love the pun in the title. I have a bit of mixed feelings about this book. I find the topic fascinating, but maybe that is also why there wasn’t very much information […]
“During the demolition of a factory, a shocking discovery is made: a mummified corpse encased in a carapace of hardened dust – phosphate rock – surrounded by ten objects that provide tantalising clues as to its identity…” That’s the backstory to Phosphate rocks, but the story is really just an […]
The story of the chemical fascination of a young boy growing up in London in the 1930s in a large Jewish family flickers in and out between biography and a history of chemistry itself. As a precocious child, Oliver Sachs, under the guidance of the title’s Uncle Tungsten, a lightbulb […]
Moscow, 1937 by Karl SchlögelMy rating: 5 of 5 stars The original title, Terror und Traum (Terror and Dream), really summarises the book perfectly. Schlögel paints a wide tapestry over Moscow and the Soviet Union at a time when it had emerged from the civil war and the future looked […]
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very entertaining introduction to what artificial intelligence does and what it doesn’t. Full of hilarious examples of AI […]
The fascinating story of the far end of the periodic table. The book starts off from the beginning of man-made elements, those beyond uranium, before moving on to the the beasts lurking above atomic number 104 – the superheavies. It’s a story I thought I knew quite well as a […]
I just finished reading Emily Lakdawalla‘s “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job“. It’s a remarkable book, even though it’s not quite the book that I expected. The first few chapters describes the general design and mission of the rover – how it came […]
Like most people that have grown up hearing the stories of World War 2, coloured through the lenses of Hollywood and British and American writes, I thought I knew all about the brave pilots of the RAF defeating the Luftwaffe and the heroes of Bletchley Park cracking the Enigma codes. […]
I really have too little time to read! I love reading, and I read a lot – just that the last couple of years I read very few books. It’s more stuff for work: articles, manuscripts to review, things students write… But to summarise last year: I managed to read […]
