Carlo Rovelli (2014)

A description of the weird world of quantum theory by someone who is both an expert in the field and a gifted communicator. It’s notoriously hard to explain quantum ideas, and Rovelli is wise and experienced enough not to try to make facile analogies that confuse rather than simplify.

The only reason for not giving the book five stars is that Rovelli occasionally can’t resist the temptation to throw in formulae, even though almost none of the readers will appreciate them (and I include myself in that). Even physicists would struggle unless they happened to be expert in exactly the right areas, and it weakens the presentation in my opinion – and is also completely unnecessary, given the lightness of his prose.

I think the place this book most shines, though, is the last chapter on the nature of scientific enquiry. It’s text that could stand alone:

Science is sometimes criticised for pretending to explain everything,
for thinking that it has an answer to every question. It’s a curious
accusation. As every researcher working in every laboratory throughout
the world knows, doing science means coming up hard against the limits
of your ignorance on a daily basis – the innumerable things that you
don’t know and can’t do. This is quite different from claiming to know
everything. We don’t know what particles we might see next year at
CERN, or what our next telescopes will reveal, or which equations
truly describe the world; we don’t know how to solve the equations we
have, and sometimes we don’t understand what they signify; we don’t
know if the beautiful theory on which we are working is right. We
don’t know what there is beyond the Big Bang; we don’t know how a
storm works, or a bacterium, or an eye – or the cells in our own
bodies, or our thought processes. A scientist is someone who lives
immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact
with our own innumerable limits, with the limits of our understanding.

…and so on, and I’m very tempted to quote it at great length. It’s text that should be read by everyone and widely disseminated amongst those who mistrust or denigrate science and expertise.

4/5. Finished Wednesday 12 July, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

George A. Akerlof (2015)

If markets provide the good people want, then they can also provide goods that people don’t or shouldn’t want – and get them to buy them through psychological or other pressure points. That’s an unexceptionable thesis, and perhaps it takes the skills of a Nobel-prize-winning economist to really bring it to life. Akerlof and Shiller do a great job of arguing that an economic equilibrium must almost necessarily be paralleled by a “phishing equilibrium” in which all prejudices and weaknesses find service. They’re particularly strong at showing how local ideas of choice don’t always integrate into globally good solutions (or even locally ones, over a longer timescale). It’s an important contribution to education to be able to argue both for markets and against their pathologies, without succumbing to the fundamentalism of either side.

3/5. Finished Monday 3 July, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Sarah Bakewell (2010)

Michel de Montaigne is a discursive writer who struggles to follow the thread of an argument, so it’s appropriate to find a biography that’s similar: and I mean this as a compliment. Bakewell takes an impossible task — distilling Montaigne’s life and thought and relationships — and presents them as a collection of partial answers to his core question of “how one should live”. Along the way she manages to draw out many of the seductive points in Montaigne’s style without getting too lost in the flurry of contradictions that he presents.

I don’t actually think this book is quite as successful as her work on existentialism, At the existentialist cafe, but it’s still an excellent biography that makes we want to re-visit the Essays.

4/5. Finished Thursday 29 June, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Larissa MacFarquhar (2015)

This is an excellent study of people who make unusual, sometimes (to some people) inexplicable, life choices. The individuals described have all made choices to serve humanity, and so so in many diverse ways: as doctors in the Indian tribal regions, as activists in volatile South American countries, as organ donors to strangers, and so on. These are choices that have been made by many over the centuries, and are only inexplicable if one assumes that people always seek to maximise their own comfort. The stories in this collection sit out on the end of a spectrum that includes teachers, nurses, care workers, and other who find meaning in jobs that satisfy them without necessarily enriching them.

What this book isn’t is about, therefore, is “moral extremity”, as the sub-title would suggest. There are few moral choices on show, although there are plenty of personal ethical decisions being made. The author makes a valiant effort to pull the psychological forces at play together, but in the end isn’t able to identify what “makes” a do-gooder: there are too many paths and too many gradations of doing good to even make a proper definition of when generosity shades over into something more – and that is itself a moving target, as shown by the excellent discussion on the evolution of how doctors in particular have thought about living transplant donors as time has gone on.

5/5. Finished Sunday 4 June, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

A well-crafted post-apocalyptic tale of how civilisation would collapse promptly in the face of a major epidemic. This is very much in the path of A Canticle for Leibowitz, albeit set in the immediate rather than far future. There are also shades of Robert Heinlein‘s novella ““If this goes on” as religion re-emerges in a particularly malign form.

The best scene, in my opinion, is the almost banal account of how a group of people behave when stranded in a rural airport, dealing with the sudden realisation that civilisation isn’t coming back, help isn’t coming, and they’ll have to fend for themselves.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 30 May, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)