Category Archives: Book Notes

Ari Wallach, LONGPATH: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs

Posted on Saturday 5 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a modest little book with great ambitions to change the way people think. And more power to it if it does. But for anyone who reads science fiction, for example, or is familiar with big issues and long-term … Continue reading →

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G.H. Hardy, A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY (1940)

Posted on Wednesday 2 November 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

In perusing some of the earliest popular books I read about mathematics, including the ones I’ve blogged about here by George Gamow and Krasner & Newman, and then searching around for any other popular mathematical texts from the early 20th … Continue reading →

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Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science

Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a short little book that is basic but substantive. Familiar yet essential. Frankly, if I had seen it in a bookstore, I would have glanced through it and likely set it back down. Seeing it online made it difficult … Continue reading →

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, and Its Reviews

Posted on Tuesday 11 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is what would be called a “literary science fiction” novel in that it’s clearly SF yet is written by a writer with a “literary” background rather than one in the SF genre, and so whose approach would be expected … Continue reading →

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Kasner & Newman, MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGINATION

Posted on Friday 30 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is another older book out of my library, one to set alongside George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity, which I reviewed back in August. This book is even older. Published in 1940, this is Mathematics and the Imagination, by … Continue reading →

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Prognostic Myopia: More about Justin Gregg

Posted on Thursday 22 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Picking up from where I left off yesterday. My basic summary of this book is: humans are not “stupid”; the issue is that human intelligence has both good and bad consequences, and apparently we can’t have the good without the … Continue reading →

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Justin Gregg: IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL (2022)

Posted on Wednesday 21 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of. Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. … Continue reading →

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Frederik Pohl’s “Outnumbering the Dead”

Posted on Sunday 11 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This week’s novella covered by the Facebook Group reading Gardner Dozois’s big anthology first discussed here is “Outnumbering the Dead” by Frederik Pohl. Coincidentally, it was first published as a chapbook, in December 1992, in the same UK publisher’s line … Continue reading →

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Son of Longtermism

Posted on Monday 22 August 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Some 14 days ago, in this post, I linked and quoted from a NYT guest essay by William MacAskill about valuing the future as much as we value the present. Which struck me as a reasonable position to take, a … Continue reading →

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George Gamow: One Two Three… Infinity

Posted on Wednesday 10 August 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s an oldie, not just for first being published in 1947 (see Wikipedia) but also for being one of the first science nonfiction books I ever read, back when I bought this copy in 1969. (Seen here is the Bantam … Continue reading →

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