Compelling popular science with an ambitious underlying theme.
Two veteran science writers address a host of big concepts.
Geneticist Rutherford and mathematician Fry begin by describing a library whose books contain every possible combination of letters, spaces, commas, and periods. “Every possible” means “infinite,” so the library would fill far more than the cosmos. Infinity is a fascinating concept, vividly explained by many authors. Rutherford and Fry, however, employ it as a metaphor for the complexity of the universe, the difficulty of communication, the evolution of language, and the mechanics of Darwinian evolution. In the chapters that follow, the authors answer intriguing, if often oddball questions. What would an alien look like? Deeply unimaginative, Hollywood gives us either humanlike beings with swollen heads or “insectoid, human-sized, phallic-headed, acid-blooded, armour plated” monsters. The authors emphasize that almost all earthly life is tiny; bacteria dominate. The total mass of plants is vastly larger than that of animals. Basic science reveals that on any planet, flying creatures will have wings; living in liquid, they’ll be torpedo-shaped; on land, they’ll have legs, maybe four, six, or more. Some readers may be surprised to learn that two-legged animals are rare. Telling time seems straightforward, but it’s actually quite complicated. An earthly day is not only not 24 hours long; an average day is not 24 hours either. The sloshing of the Earth’s liquid core, the tug of the moon and planets, and even winds make the time of one earthly rotation “totally unpredictable.” Atomic clocks are the most accurate time-keepers, losing “less than a second every 15 billion years.” Throughout history, predicting the end of the world has been irresistible; surveys today reveal that 1 in 7 people think it will happen during their lifetime. After an amusing review of doomsday cults, the authors reveal the facts: The sun is slowly getting hotter and will render the Earth uninhabitable in roughly 1 billion years.
Compelling popular science with an ambitious underlying theme.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-88157-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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