About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Johann Hari
Positive The Times (UK) Sometimes Hari is still a little free and easy. Not only with irrebuttable speculations about future, as yet unknown side-effects, but also with his citations ... If I have a genuine quibble with the book, it’s how frequently a key pivot follows a chance social meeting with a friend, whose surname is never given, and whose extensive quotes, perfectly recalled, then act as an almost perfect setup for the next chapter. Even if he didn’t have a history of quotation-shenanigans, I would still want an explanation of how this worked ... He is a highly skilled writer who has tried very hard to make this book readable.
Carlo Rovelli
Positive The Times (UK) \"There is a confidence to Rovelli’s writing. Like Virgil, he is our guide to the unknown. He takes us through literary allusion, scientific history and personal anecdote...His skill is his way of persuading you as a reader that these ideas, ideas that really work only in the language of mathematics, are just within your grasp. And yet — this is no reflection on him as an author — you reach for them and, like a dandelion seed held aloft on a summer breeze, they flit playfully out of your grasp, always just beyond reach ... it is always worth reading Rovelli. He writes as though he believes you are as learned and clever as he is. Yet he also writes with such care for your ignorance that it feels as if every page is urging and coaxing you — a non-physicist — to see what he can see. So I do not feel cheated that I have just read a book whose central theory might well be incorrect. Nor do I feel cheated that, if I’m honest, I don’t completely understand what that theory is. Theoretical physics has long since ceased to be accessible to those who read about it in words.\
Andreas Wagner
Positive The Times (UK) Where Wagner really excels is in the detail — especially when it comes to his own field ... Where the detail is more lacking is when we move beyond biology. Sleeping Beauties is, to an extent, a book-length metaphor — where biological innovations mirror those in technology and culture. The technology part is briskly covered in a final chapter — I would have loved more and, ideally, for it to be integrated throughout.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Rave The Times (UK) ... [Mukherjee] completes a trilogy of doorstopper-length biological showstoppers ... executed with the intimidating competence of a US magazine journalist ... Even his formidable writing skills can’t always hide the complexity of the topic, however ... If there is a flaw in this book, then, it is its ambition. The range of topics covered is vast: the brain, the heart, stem cells, the immune system, amoeboids. Mukherjee’s problem is that the cell is the building block of everything that lives — which makes focusing the book, or even giving it a narrative, nigh-on impossible ... Imagine reading a history of the brick, and finding the author had to not only describe walls, not only describe the Great Wall of China, but also describe the geopolitical and climatological triggers of the rise of the Mongol hordes that led to its construction — and the intricacies of the siege weaponry that determined its design. That is a little like what it feels getting to the section on the immune system ... Cell biology is complex and as big a topic as life itself; I’m not sure a writer could cover it better.
Michael Lewis
Mixed The Times (UK) Lewis is superb at this kind of thing. It is tremendous fun, tremendously told. It is a measure of his skill that he can talk about epidemiologists who call themselves Wolverines and not make them sound like utter ninnies ... Equally, it is hard to tell how much significance to place on it. The personal focus is the book’s strength and, in the sense that we are meant to take a wider message, its weakness ... Are these really the lone mavericks we are led to believe? Occasionally some chap called Neil Ferguson pops up, and you get a sense the Wolverines are not alone, or that their \'roughneck epidemiology\' is not quite so revolutionary. Equally it may be that the US Centers for Disease Control really is, as his interviewees tell it, the useless laggard of international health. Or it may be that within that organisation too, at the same time, you could find people sounding the alarm and trying their best ... For British readers that is an obvious and significant flaw in the book. How much do you care about the idiosyncrasies of one country’s failure when we have our own failures to consider? It also feels like one, though, for American readers ... The stories that still need to be told, the ones where it is possible individuals really made a difference, are elsewhere ... But it is wrong to criticise a book for not being a different book. Lewis’s tale is instead perhaps best thought of as being to the pandemic what Band of Brothers is to the Second World War.
Simon Baron-Cohen
Mixed The Times (UK) ...his certainty seems misplaced. It may indeed be that 70,000 years ago in Africa a naked ape evolved the ability to systemise and so conquered the world. Might it also be, though, that 70,000 years ago our ancestors also evolved grammatical language, meaning that at last the best inventors were able to pass their inventions on? It’s at least possible. Baron-Cohen has a habit of making assertions of fact that I’m not sure have reached that standard of evidence yet.
Leonard Mlodinow
Positive The Times (UK) Slowly, through [Mlodinow] descriptions of cheek twitches, raised eyebrows, stilted dinner parties and snatched glances, we too see through the motor neurone disease to get a sense of the man himself. Or at least we think we do ... The problem with writing about Hawking in his later years is there is so little to write ... The picture that emerges is not so big on twinkling eyes — a bit more on the frustrated, fallible and occasionally infuriating side. And it is all the more human for it ... Mlodinow gently shows us he was also rude, vain and inconsiderate. He was habitually, unapologetically late, he held court like an emperor and he could be utterly crushing when he wanted to be ... When someone speaks at a few words a minute, they don’t always make for good copy. This is one reason why Mlodinow is forced to go back to a time when Hawking did say things ... Mlodinow is a good writer. You are unlikely to find a better primer to Hawking, or to his physics. Even so, much of it is, to use a journalistic term, a \'cuts job\' — stories drawn from other sources. At the end we are left with as good a picture as we are likely to get of a man who was surely the most improbable global celebrity of the early 21st century. Yet I’m not sure how much closer we really are to knowing what was going on behind that twitching cheek and lopsided smile.
Gaia Vince
Positive The Times (UK) ... beautifully written ... These are books that, like passengers on a 747, see human society from above — that weave multimillennia-long narratives of gradual change shaped by geography, geology and biology. It is impossible to read Transcendence without finding echoes of the others that have gone before ... We read these books for anecdotes and insights, for tidy explanations of an untidy world. Transcendence is full of such nuggets ... At her best Vince takes dizzying leaps, making connections between archaeology, anthropology, genetics and psychology. She is especially good on the delicate interplay between genes, environment and culture ... Some of this will be familiar ... But even on well-trodden ground, Vince steps with lightness. She also avoids some of the misplaced certainty of her peers — reminding us of the ambiguity in all of this. Not least in whether we should be the apes telling this story at all.
Kate Devlin
Positive The Times (UK) \"Devlin is an academic. The way she tells it, she has found herself largely by chance in this research topic — and was then surprised by the media interest. She shouldn’t be. Sex robots throw up some wonderful dilemmas, from the salacious, to the existential, to the philosophical, to all three at once ... This book at times romps through philosophy, technology and social history. One of Devlin’s achievements is to humanise the sex robot makers and the users — we are invited not to laugh at them, but to understand them. However, the breadth of its ambition can leave Turned On feeling a bit shapeless. There are points where it is not always clear where Devlin is leading the reader. Ultimately, though, her conclusion is that society has nothing to fear from the sex robot, and the \'future of intimacy is not bleak.\'\
Henry Nicholls
Positive The Times UK Is there anything worse than insomnia? Narcolepsy for a start, says Tom Whipple ... Sleepyhead is about Nicholls’s narcolepsy, but it is also about why the insights it has given him should matter to any of us who have had sleep problems. And that’s most of us ... There is a telling passage in the preface to the book, where Nicholls said he had planned to write a book solely about narcolepsy. \'My agent and publisher encouraged me to go further.\' I bet they did. Those parts of the book about his personal experience, where he expertly weaves anecdote and science, are definitely the strongest. Luckily, even when the book is broadened out to wider sleep problems, these passages are still the majority of the book.