Caleb Scharf

There’s nothing in the least pretentious or precious about this book. It’s a straightforward tour through over forty orders of magnitude, from universal-scale gravitating structures to quarks and then on down to the Planck length, the theoretically smallest distance. In many ways this resembles a 1980’s popular science book for early teens – and given how much I enjoyed those at that age, it’s hardly a surprise that I loved this one too.

5/5. Finished Saturday 24 February, 2018.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

David Enrich (2017)

Another exploration of the financial crisis, this time the manipulation of Libor by a group of bankers: one can’t really call them a cartel or gang, I think, as that implies a conspiracy and direction that was absent. And that’s what makes the story so interesting to me: that a group of individuals essentially self-organised by looking to their own interests into a collective defrauding of most of the Western world.

And they were so unaware! – not simply in the sense of defending themselves, but in their inability to see beyond the horizons of the “game” of finance, to the fact that they weren’t living in a closed universe where their actions lacked wider implications. The protagonist is clearly clinically Aspergic, but one has to wonder to what extent all the players had somehow managed to shut off their peripheral vision.

I think the story also has implications for regulation that have been raised before: how do you deter people who don’t believe their actions are criminal? It’s not that they don’t think they’ll be caught: it’s that they don’t see they’ve anything to be caught for, and that strokes at the heart of a lot of regulation. The fact that society falls on them post facto might be somewhat satisfying, but it doesn’t prevent recurrence, not least because none of the more senior players face meaningful sanction. There are still a lot of crises to come until ww come to terms with this.

4/5. Finished Saturday 11 November, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

J.D. Vance (2016)

What happens when a rural culture spills-out into a more urban environment? What happens when the ties between parts of families are broken by distance, and the habits that might have sustained them in their new surroundings turn out to be toxic in isolation? That’s the world that Vance explores, and indeed from which he escaped. This is by turns social commentary and a deeply personal memoir, made stronger by the authors’ insights into his own behaviour and evolution, his interactions with his girlfriend (and later wife) from outside the boundaries of his own hillbilly background.

I don’t think the book is quite the searing explanation of recent American politics that it has been presented to be: that feels to me like an over-reading, and an unnecessary one given that it does explain well many features of American working class struggle. Many aspects feel uniquely American: despite a clear lineage in Scots-Irish immigration, I can’t see many of the factors at work in the UK or Europe, and we should be glad for that, but I’m sure there’s a similar story waiting to be told in these countries too.

4/5. Finished Saturday 11 November, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Ed Yong (2016)

I must say I expected to enjoy this book much more than I did. The premise is powerful: the effects that bacteria have at a macro scale in terms of human health and even behaviour. There are some wonderful musings on the far-reaching effects of bacterial evolution, for example in the observation that all eukaryotic cells (those with mitochondria and a nucleus) come from a single common ancestor, strongly suggesting that this is an evolutionary event that happened only once – and so might not occur in other contexts, making life more scarce in the universe than we might otherwise think.

Despite these tours de force, there’s something unsatisfactory about the presentation. It’s too breathless, too focussed, too willing to ascribe almost any phenomenon to bacterial causes and influences. A more balanced, shorter, presentation might have served better for me.

2/5. Finished Saturday 11 November, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Timothy Snyder (2017)

4/5. Finished Saturday 11 November, 2017.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)