... sprightly, if occasionally heavy-going ... Boxer is a data scientist with a PhD in physics, as well as degrees in the history of science and classics. When it comes to astrology, he is surprisingly open-minded, a rare stance for a scientist ... Boxer’s tone is lighthearted throughout, his writing lean and smart. Yet he doesn’t shy away from complexity. As a matter of fact, he serves up plenty of it. As the book moves along, the content grows increasingly matted with data analysis and algorithmic musings that could leave many readers behind ... But the intellectual heavy lifting shouldn’t be a deterrent. There’s enough in A Scheme of Heaven to satisfy the curious layperson and the data geek alike. The chart of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions vis-a-vis presidential peril alone is worth the price of this book. And with his lovely prose, Boxer makes it relatively easy to navigate — if not celestially then literarily — around the difficult bits. A journey through Boxer’s own scheme of heaven is one well worth taking.
Boxer is at his most dynamic when arguing for the relevance of astrology in an era of Big Data and machine learning ... With Boxer’s thought-provoking offering of playful experiments and vibrant historical anecdotes, A Scheme of Heaven will entice even the most ardent sceptic.
... wide-ranging and full of peculiar nuggets of information ... Boxer has fun examining the claims of astrology ... While the maths isn’t written with the lay person in mind and the astrology at times goes in at the deep end, the anecdotes carry this otherwise quite readable work. Happily, there isn’t any indulgence of occult nonsense. This is a book about a very human aspect of astrology — our desire to understand our fate — and its history, as well as the fallibility of data analysis, which is often far more subjective than it might seem at first glance.
