Book review: The Sense Of Style, by Steven Pinker

The Sense Of Style
Steven Pinker (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

Steven Pinker is an dazzling thinker, an excellent writer and a brilliant matchmaker of the two - marrying complex ideas to simple English.

This has not happened by chance. He has studied hard to make his writing appear easy and now wishes to share his learning.

Business books: Think Like A Freak, The Reckoning

BOOKS

Think Like A Freak
Levitt & Dubner (Penguin)
★★✩✩✩

In 2005, the double act of Steven D Levitt (economist) and Stephen J Dubner (writer) stumbled upon a new name for the old practice of thinking outside the box - Freakonomics.

Book review: Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis

BOOKS

Flash Boys
Michael Lewis (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩

Everything changes in the blink of an eye, they say. That's about 300 milliseconds.

Books: David And Goliath, Difficult Men, Two Girls, One On Each Knee

David And Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits And The Art Of Battling Giants
Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane)
★★★★✩

David and Goliath. Great story. That David. Beat the odds. didn't he. with his sling and stuff against the big bruiser Goliath. Every loser wins, as TV's Nick Berry once said.

That's not how it was.

Doink! You what?

Book review: The Universe Within, by Neil Shubin

BOOK
The Universe Within
Neil Shubin (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Shubin tries to make sense of the universe using the human body and behaviour as the keyhole to peep through.

REVIEW
The universe, as lesser scientists than Neil Shubin have pointed out, is a vast place.

It contains wonders that defy credulity all presented in magnitudes that stretch the meagre capacities of our imagination.

Tall order then for an author to capture its marvels in print, especially in such a compact length - other authors please take note.

Distinguished scientist Shubin has opted to take the tricks of his first love - paleontology - to give this book a spine. Fossils are glimpses and clues to the real beast. In the same way, the human body is a synedoche for just about everything there ever was.

From DNA, to time-telling, from the products of the Big Bang, to celestial imbalances that produce Ice Ages, Shubin sets out to show that a residue of all existence is contained in our own bodies. Neat idea, neat book.