Category Archives: Book Notes

Nonfiction Notes: Michael Shermer: WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS

Posted on Saturday 6 February 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. (W.H. Freeman, 1997) Here’s one of the earliest books that address human irrationality in terms of both the evidence against various pseudoscientific beliefs, and the … Continue reading →

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Nonfiction Notes: Neil F. Comins, HEAVENLY ERRORS: Misconceptions about the real nature of the universe (2001)

Posted on Thursday 4 February 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a book I’ve had for nearly 20 years, since its publication in 2001, and finally I sat down last year, 2020, and read it. I had thought it would be a book about common misconceptions of the universe … Continue reading →

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Notes and Quotes: Frank Wilczek’s FUNDAMENTALS: TEN KEYS TO REALITY

Posted on Saturday 30 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose earlier book A BEAUTIFUL QUESTION: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (2015) I have but have not yet read. (It looks fascinating – the kind big picture book, that tries to understand history or … Continue reading →

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Notes and Quotes: Arthur C. Clarke’s THE DEEP RANGE (1957)

Posted on Sunday 24 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a relatively quick take on a 1950s novel I reread this past week — not as long or as polished as my Black Gate reviews have been. (I’ll be resuming those in February.) THE DEEP RANGE was the 8th … Continue reading →

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Notes and Quotes: Ezra Klein’s WHY WE’RE POLARIZED (2020)

Posted on Sunday 17 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized was published a full year ago, in January 2020. Ezra Klein is a co-founder of the ‘explainer’ website Vox, and writes essays and columns for various other outlets. (And he lives somewhere here in Oakland.) The … Continue reading →

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Carl Sagan: Cosmos (1980)

Posted on Friday 11 December 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Cosmos may fairly be called one of the foundational books of my life (even moreso than Sagan’s earlier The Cosmic Connection, revisited here in 2015) even though I hadn’t read the entire book until this year. The book was a … Continue reading →

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Rutger Bregman, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2014/2017)

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a breezy, fast-reading book that summarizes grand conclusions simply and directly, and then provides background references to support those conclusions in 40 pages of notes at the end. The Dutch author is “one of the continent’s most prominent … Continue reading →

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Andrew Shtulman: SCIENCEBLIND: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong

Posted on Sunday 13 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(Basic Books, 2017) Here’s a book I read earlier this year and am only just now boiling my notes down into a coherent summary. (Well actually I started boiling my notes down but ended up just cleaning up the remainder, … Continue reading →

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Heinlein, SPACE CADET (1948)

Posted on Sunday 2 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m reviewing detailed notes of books I’ve read in recent years but not yet posted about, and boiling them down into summaries and comments more useful to readers than if I simply posted all the detailed notes. (And in truth, … Continue reading →

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Jonathan Gottschall: THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: How Stories Make Us Human

Posted on Friday 3 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a nonfiction book from 2012 that I just read this past month. It’s one of three or four books I have (another is called HOUSTON, WE HAVE A NARRATIVE: WHY SCIENCE NEEDS STORY) that are about the idea of … Continue reading →

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