The Tipping Point (M. Gladwell)

I had heard about this book, “The Tipping Point”, for a while and decided to give it a read. At first, I thought it was going to be something like “Built to Last” or “First, Break All the Rules”: a book with a single message that could have been written as two sentences, but is fluffed up with examples and discussions. Not the case here.

A tipping point, according to the author, is a sudden change in the state of a mass of humans according to which something that was not popular just before the tipping point is popular after. The tipping point fits in the theory of the chasm, according to which there is a strong difference between the first people that adopt a technology and the next group. This book is about what kind of things help moving across the chasm and generating a tipping point.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (B. Bryson)

What a fun book to read! Mr. Bryson succeeds in the almost impossible: he writes a book that both explains science and history of science in context, jumping randomly from one topic to another based on personal relationships between the main actors, and succeeding in reconstructing pretty much all there is to know about modern science.

What a kick. I followed the book page for page, amused at the links between the scientists and benefactors, seeing how one discipline would gain from the loss of the other; how fashions drive the pursuit of knowledge; how progress in one area facilitates progress in another.

The Rule of Four (I. Caldwell & D. Thomason)

Sometimes a book is just killed by its own hype. You will read the book cover and find some absurd hyperbole, and the content has no chance of measuring up to the expectation. For this to happen, the book has to have a certain amount of mediocrity, and the hyperbole must be spectacular.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with The Rule of Four. If Umberto Eco, Dan Brown and Scott Fitzgerald had collaborated on a book, the result would have been this one. Highly unlikely, I would say. Instead, it turns out to be a lame mystery based on a lame plot with lame figures.

The Fabric of the Cosmos (B. Greene)

In ‘The Elegant Universe", Mr. Greene hints at the fact he is writing a book about the meaning of space and time, the twin brothers that define the physical universe. That’s actually a book very well worth writing, since space and time are entirely strange concepts in physics, radically different than anything else.

For one, the twins are usually constructed a priori and simply entered into equations without discussion. That’s troublesome enough. Then, to make things worse, we know there is something called equivalence of space and time, but if you go and look at the equations, there is a strange commutation factor in time that makes the whole equivalence look frightening.

The Eight (K. Neville)

The female counterpart to ‘The Name of the Rose’? I don’t think so. But at the same time, a well-written book that succeeds in translating a numerological fixation into a compelling tale of adventure. Kudos to the author!

I should mention: chess is the non-numerological fixation. Everything in chess revolves around the number 8, so that the combination of game and number actually buffers the book pretty well.

There is a lot to like about this book, and a lot to dislike. On the ‘like’ side, some phenomenal descriptions of the North African countryside, and a plot that moves and turns around, but that has a clear intent and coherent speed.

Sophie's World (J. Gaarder)

A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Now, THAT sounds boring, doesn’t it?
A philosophy teacher falls into deep ennui out of his students’ boredom and decides to write a book that makes the history of philosophy an interesting topic. To achieve the result, the book is about a high-school student and her familial problems. And philosophy is the solution of the problem.
Sounds a bit contrived? Well, that’s the story behind Sophie’s World. Not the plot, mind you, but the raison d’etre. The story itself is even more contrived, and ends on a formulaic note of the existentialist kind. It’s like reading Michael Ende, but without any fantasy involved.
In the end, the book is just a replacement for a text book for challenged youth. The story doesn’t flow, doesn’t make any sense, and still remains predictable. Of course, all of this is not true if this book is your first encounter with philosophy, and you do care about 14 year old girls and their outlook on life. Then the distant father figure moves you; the dialogues on philosophers become interesting, and even the leaden description of the characters takes a back seat. It’s like going back in time and reading “The Name of the Rose” all over again.
Ok, so I have to admit I learned about the history of philosophy in high school. It was more fun there, when we could talk with our teacher about all those speculations and reasons. When we could follow the wacky lives of a great many philosophers: their love affairs, their mysterious escapes, their poverty, their craziness. There seemed to be no philosopher that didn’t have a serious issue in life, and we highlighted those with gusto.
Just like ‘Troy’, the movie, omitted the Greek gods and with them all the fun, this book has no relevant embarrassment in store for the philosophers. It is all very clean, as if the author was really trying to get the book approved as text book.
All in all, disappointing. Read something else, if you know about philosophy. And if you don’t, please get yourself a real history of philosophy. They are much more fun, anyway.

An Adventurer's Guide to Number Theory (R. Friedberg)

Ok, this one is quite a disappointment. To be short, this book is a simple treatise of elementar number theory with very apt vignettes on the major players in this field of mathematics interspersed where appropriate.
In the end, it is quite an interesting book for high-school kids that want to move on to college maths. The examples are very cogent, the flow of the logic easy to follow, the structure well-articulated and managed.
At the same time, there is no adventure or an adventurer in this book. Maybe a humbler title would have helped its cause. In any case, there are better books on elementary number theory, as well as better histories of mathematics.
I am not sure why you would want to read this book.

Bringing Down the House (B. Mezrich)

Geeks applying maths to lead a luxurious life in Vegas? Who could resist a book like that? “The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Miilions” sounds like too good to be true. And since you are probably used to my review spoilers by now, I will confess it isn’t.
Ben Mezrich tells the story as the first-person reporter who finds out about this group and has the unique chance to report about it. The writing is compelling, never too technical, always quite realistic, which makes the tension and suspense very believable.
Turns out the six M.I.T. students in the title are part of a group of players at the college that learned how to exploit a weakness in blackjack, the only winnable game in Vegas. They become “card counters”, that is they offset low cards with high cards and keep track of a running score. If a particular deck is particularly positiive (more low cards have been played than high cards), then game theory shows the player is likely to win against the house.This was very well known in player circles, and card counting had become a profession for a short while. Of course, once the casinos got wind of the trick, they prevented professional players from ever playing again. But of course, the weakness of the game persisted, and Vegas and the counters became embroiled in a technology war.
A team of players could easily outperform a single player, because some players could simply sit and wait at tables until the count became high. Once there was a positive signal, a different player (a Gorilla) could be called in. The gorilla would always play against a good deck, hence bet a lot. So there wouldn’t be the fluctuation in betting that gave the older pros away.
Well, we are talking about riding a multi-million dollar game. Mezrich does a really good job at portraying the kids – young, overachieving college students from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The game has everything they could ask for: it requires smarts, it yields lots of cheap money, it involves weekends of wild parties, and of course it is a fun adventure, stacked against the odds of a mobster mentality that in the end wins the game.
Mezrich doesn’t really take sides in the story. While we sympathize with the kids, we experience them as real humans. They disagree, they betray each other, they fall out with each other and reconcile. The forces of evil are not as bad as they seem at first. The encounter with casino executives never resembles an execution, and on multiple occasions the kids are let go with their wins, with the simple admonition never to come back.
In the end, the casinos win the technology war. The six students that could have to retire and give up gambling, have to find themselves in the normalcy of a life that seems so unreal after the surreal life in Vegas and other joints around the country.
Well done. It is a book of research and portrayal, one that makes Vegas look better than it should. In the end, knowing about blackjack the way I do now, even I feel inclined to play a gamble at the blackjack table.

The Book of Eleanor (P. Kaufman)

Isn’t it a bit scary if the heroine in a book about the Middle Ages looks airbrushed? I thought so, too. And yet, this novel is not a fake. Eleanor of Aquitaine is certainly a wonderful character to portray in a novel, and Pamela Kaufman does an outstanding job at clarifying a life that seems at odds with itself and its times.
Eleanor grows up the hier of the Duke of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful duchies in France. Intrigues and deception dominate her youth, just as courtship and love do. Just as she finds the love of her life, she is to marry the future King of France in a marriage that is to wed the riches of her duchy to the power of the king.
Alas, turns out the king is a real bore, domineered by clerics who want to evince a life of frustration from him. Eleanor is annoyed and wants out, since the king is after her land and not after her beauty.
She ends up following the fool to the Holy Land, where his ineptitude almost crushes the entire army. She’s got the love of her life with her, so he gets a chance to prove how wonderful he is. Of course, that causes the king’s ire, and everything almost comes to an abrupt end.
Later on, she gets an annullment feigning consanguineity and depravity. The king marries another woman, and just when Eleanor thinks she can get the love of her life, the King of England marches in, rapes her, gets her pregnant and carries her off to his home land.
As it were, that’s where the book starts. Eleanor has once more committed some heinous act of betrayal and is to be carted off to Wales to die in a rotting tower. She will survive and write this book as a memento.
Ok, and I started saying it was credible, why?
Maybe it’s the fact that the vast majority of successful writers certainly focus on the female sex when writing. Eleanor quite doesn’t seem credible as a warm and gentle woman. To survive in the climate of the time, she must have been ruthless and cruel, at times, but in this book, only the bad guys are.
There’s nothing wrong with a classic plot line of good vs. evil in a novel about the Middle Ages, so I can’t really fault the author. Still, I wonder how much the book would have benefited from a more balanced look.
The writing itself is very compelling, and the pace in the story quite easy to follow. Pamela Kaufman surely deserves her bestseller status, given the craft and sheer intelligence she brings to the development of the story.

The Elegant Universe (B. Greene)

What would you read on a week’s long vacation to Maui? You know, sunshine, palms, sand and an inviting ocean? Well, your truly chose (amongs others) The Elegant Universe, a pop-science book by one of the more outstanding string theorists.
Boring? Certainly not. I am a physicist by trade, and I always had a hard time finding the patience to deal with string theory. At some point I knew I would have to do it, and this one was as good an attempt to learn as any other.
String theory is famous for two main reasons:1. It has a successful explanation as to why we experience two sets of forces (gravity on one end and all other elementary forces on the other one) in one single reality2. A very weird view of the world, in which there are infinitesimal dimensions that are curled up, just so that some esoteric mathematical property of spaces beyond a certain dimension holds.
It all sounded too much like the desire to form the universe after the model of the theory. In particular, the extra dimensions seemed to complicate things too much for my pleasure, especially because no observable was associated with these extra dimensions, only mathematical properties.
Then, thinking again, I realized that quantum mechanics must have sounded pretty crazy in the day, too; and there is not the slightest doubt that QM is the best theory in the world when it comes to measurements. The same is true for relativity, another crazy idea in the day.
Who should read The Elegant Universe? It is a very scientific book, trying to explain cover to cover how things work, who is involved in string theory, and how all this edifice came into being. You will sorely miss the prickly debate and the juicy commentary that many other science books offer. This one explains one and only one thing: who came up with string theory, why, and how.
Even if you noticed that’s actually three things, you won’t get much more satisfaction from this book than that. I remember reading a great many attempts to popularize special relativity, even watching Peter Ustinov’s documentary, and getting more confused than before I watched.
Then, one day in the library in Aachen, I discovered the original 1905 ‘Annalen der Physik’ where Einstein published the original theory. All of a sudden everything was clear, and I found that all the attempts to clarify were muddying the waters ever since.
You see, before Einstein came, the laws governing special relativity were all there. What Einstein brought to the equation in this case was simply an overarching explanation that rationalized all the strangeness.
String theory, it seems, needs to find its Einstein. It is a beautiful theory, but it doesn’t really explain much – at least reading this book. One day, if we are lucky and this theory holds, someone will come and explain just why things are supposed to be this way. And that person will make string theory obsolete by simply explaining it in terms outside of it.
Until then, everyone should probably know something about it. This is as good a book as any one.