Title: 

This is a primer on the basic ideas of relativity. It includes great, illustrative cartoons and very little math. The author addresses many of the misconceptions people might have about concepts related to relativity because of pop culture and introduces some surprising ways relativity affects our daily lives.

Even though relativity is a topic I’ve been interested in since high school, I learned fascinating new facts from this book. The author made incredibly complex and counterintuitive concepts simple. He started with facts that made sense to me and built on them to make the odder results of relativity make sense too. I liked that he revisited the same thought experiments over and over. This made me comfortable with the ideas and helped me learn.

I liked that the author talked about the implications of relativity for our daily lives. He made a pretty convincing argument for why we should all care about the concepts he teaches here. I also loved that he taught the scientific method as he went. I think this is a book that would be perfect for introductory physics classes. It’s easy to follow and  could inspire students to become interested in the topic.

Amazon|Goodreads

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Title: 

Michio Kaku is first and foremost a theoretical physicist, so he begins his book describing a physicist’s perspective on how the brain works. Then he describes the latest and greatest advances in our understanding of how the brain works and makes some incredible predictions for the future. These include everything from the possibility of assisted telepathy and enhanced cognition to uploadable memories and recordable dreams.

I’ve loved Michio Kaku’s books since high school, maybe earlier. He was able to write about theoretical physics in such an approachable, interesting way. Since reading his books, this is a topic which I always want to learn more about. As someone in working in science, I now also appreciate his ability to bring science to the masses. This book was not quite as good at this as some of the earlier books. There were a few places where I felt an experiment on animals was inadequately explained to the point where it sounded like a mad scientist’s experiment. There were also a few typos that led to scientific inaccuracies in my ARC, but I think these will be fixed in the final version.

That said, I thought his discussion of future technologies was fantastic. As in Physics of the Future, his educated predictions about where science will be within the century were awe inspiring. Also similarly, he transitioned very smoothly from topic to topic and did a great job discussing the ethical implications of each potential technology. To finish with a quote from my review of Physics of the Future, which also applies to this book: “I would highly recommend this book to scientists as well as any non-scientists who’d like to be better informed (which in my opinion, should really be everyone, since that’s who this science is going to affect!). But for scientists in particular, it’s important to always remember three things: the social implications of your work; the ethical implications of your work; and the big dreams we should all be striving for in order to make our daily lives better. This book does a great job bringing home all of those points.”

Amazon|Goodreads

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Non-Fiction Friday is a link-up where you can find all of the awesome non-fiction happenings of the week. Be sure to link-up your non-fiction posts too!

• Today, two of the links I’d like to share are awesome links shared by Sophie at Paper Breathers in her weekly round-up. The first is a prize awarded to books with the strangest titles and they’re all non-fiction! And also all very strange. The second link is to Bill Gates’ bookshelf because he apparently has fantastic taste in non-fiction.
• This isn’t completely non-fiction but it is completely wonderful! Sync Audiobooks gives away free audiobook downloads all summer. Non-fiction titles in this summer’s schedule include: While The World Watched, Claudette Colvins, and The Hiding Place
• Exciting books coming out this week include:
  • Computing with Quantum Cats: From Colossus to Qubits
  • The First World War in 100 Objects: The Story of the Great War Told Through the Objects that Shaped It
  • Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It
  • The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family’s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest

The post Non-Fiction Friday appeared first on Doing Dewey.

As is so often the case, the movie added exciting but completely fictional events to the events of the book. In some ways, this might have been the right thing to do. For instance, even with the added action, my boyfriend who had not read the book found the movie a bit slow. However, I think these men deserve to be remembered and I think fictionalizing their story defeats the purpose of telling it to begin with. I found the fictionalized crush the one women had on one of the men in the movie particularly offensive because I think she seems less admirable as a result. I also disliked that exciting events were made up. There were instances in the book, such as one of the monuments men being mistaken for a spy that could have been humorously elaborated on instead of making things up from scratch. For all my complaints, I think this was a well made if slightly slow movie. It just doesn’t stand up well to a comparison with the wonderful book!

The post The Monuments Men – A Bookish Movie Review appeared first on Doing Dewey.

Title: 

I’m constantly intrigued by the many amazing true stories from the WWII period and this is another good one. The Monuments Men were a group of mostly older men from artistic careers who volunteered to go to Europe to protect monuments during the Allied offensive. They also became involved in retrieving and returning the many valuable art works stolen by German forces. As the war turned against them, German commanders were ordered to destroy art rather than let it be recaptured. Meanwhile, Russian troops claimed any art work they found as the spoils of war. Limited support left the Monuments Men trying to accomplish miracles, rescuing art as quickly as possible.

I enjoyed this book from the very beginning. The author starts with notes about sources and an explanation of how dialog in the book was crafted from primary sources. I love knowing exactly where the information I’m reading comes from, so I really appreciate books with a section like this. The author also includes small biographies with pictures of each of the major players in the story. This was incredibly helpful throughout the book. Something I’m sure it’s hard to do is to help the reader connect with the large number of people involved in a project like this. The biographies gave me something to refer back to each time a character was mentioned. That helped me keep track of everyone enough to have a connection with each of the characters. I think that was critical to my enjoyment of this book.

The book also included some personal stories about each of the men (and the one woman) involved. These were perfectly balanced with sections describing the art and sections describing the action. The author also did a great job integrating the story of the Monuments Men into the overall story of the war. There were descriptions of some of the major battles which I’d heard about before, but there were also more new-to-me descriptions of the time leading up to the war, the experience at the homefront, and the ending of the war in Germany. Although the descriptions of battles made me think deeply about whether the Monuments Men’s choice to risk their life for art made sense, the author does clearly articulate the reasons they thought this choice was worthwhile. The author did a great job telling their story in an engaging way and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII or art history.

Amazon|Goodreads

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Title: 

I think objectively this book is very well done. The author includes a lot of very detailed statistics but mixes them in with fun facts, first-hand anecdotes, and fascinating stories. However, for me, this was just more detail than I needed on the topic. I felt the story got bogged down by details of exact numbers and dates. There were a number of people mentioned, but I couldn’t keep them straight because we were never given any personal information about any them and they all blurred together. The timeline was hard to follow because (at least in my ARC) dates usually didn’t include the year and in chapters that spanned multiple years, this could be confusing. I think had I finished this, I’d have given it three stars because I didn’t enjoy it, but I think someone very interested in the topic would. I made it through about a third of the book before deciding that it just wasn’t for me.

Amazon|Goodreads

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Non-Fiction Friday is a link-up where you can find all of the awesome non-fiction happenings of the week. Be sure to link-up your non-fiction posts too!

• I’m so glad this professor is encouraging more people to write creative non-fiction (aka narrative non-fiction) because I want to read more
• Speaking of creative non-fiction, just the description of this book of essays on the topic raises some fascinating questions!
• I was surprised to see that tumblr has some pretty interesting non-fiction related content! Now if only I were better at using tumblr…
• This week, these are some of the exciting new releases:
  • The Extreme Life of the Sea
  • It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
  • Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science
  • Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
  • Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
  • Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris

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Title: 

This is the story of five couples doing group marriage counseling and of one author who sat in on the sessions. I  liked that it became a story that was a little bit about the author too. This could easily have turned into a detached third-person narrative. Instead, it’s clear that the author connected with the couples, so it’s easy for the reader to connect too. That does make this some very unobjective non-fiction though. The author isn’t shy about inserting her own speculations about the couples’ feelings. However, she generally makes it clear when she’s speculating, so I didn’t mind too much. I think a similar fictional story could be a great character driven narrative, but I liked that this was non-fiction. It made the story more interesting that it was true. It made it easy for the author to hold information back without being manipulative because she shared information in the order she found it out. And of course, it made for a very believable story. This is in part due to the author’s ability to convey the personalities of the people involved, but I’m sure the fact that they were real people didn’t hurt either!

Title: The Neighborhood Project
Author: David Sloan Wilson
Source: library
Rating: ★★★★☆

This book describes some incredible examples of applied science. The author had studied a lot of questions relating to evolution before he decided that if an evolutionary approach is truly valuable, it should be possible to use that theory to improve our quality of life. He selected his hometown of Binghamton, NY as a testing ground. In the data collection phase, he discovered enough fun facts for any trivia lover to enjoy. The coolest parts though were those where he actually works to improve his city. This was a very inspiring story and the author does a great job giving people some idea of what being a scientist is like (although in my experience it’s more work and less cycling around the countryside than in his description). You get to see the vast knowledge at our fingertips, learn about great experiments, and hear stories of how many different people were attracted to working in science. I’d love to see this book read in high school or early undergrad science classes.

Title: Tiny Beautiful Things
Author: Cheryl Strayed
Source: library
Rating: ★★★★★

 When I just read a few of these essays in isolation, I thought they were a little strange and over-shared more of the author’s personal life than I ever wanted to know. But from Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness‘s review it sounded really good and so I decided to give it a try. I’m so glad I did! Something about the introduction putting context around the author’s writing and then reading it all together made me appreciate it in a new and different way. I actually loved that the author shared so much of her personal life. It was a very different approach to giving advice from the typical disintant columnist and, I think, far better. As the author writes more, you get to know her and you have to know someone before you can trust their advice. Occasionally, I was bothered by her advice, such as the essay where she unequivocally suggests that two women get divorced just because they’re not feeling it any more. Most of the time though, I found her encouraging, straight-forward, and insightful. Even when I disagreed with her, I was awed by her way with words and by her ability to speak so personally in a public forum. These short essays really pack an emotional punch. Highly recommended.

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Non-Fiction Friday is a link-up where you can find all of the awesome non-fiction happenings of the week. Be sure to link-up your non-fiction posts too!

• This isn’t specifically non-fiction news, but there’s a new book review site called Literally that I think has a ton of potential! First three people to ask are welcome to the invites I have
• Using non-fiction in the classroom seems to be a hot topic, from this post on bookforum advocating replacing fiction with non-fiction to the many responding articles
• This article on non-fiction for book groups was quite interesting, despite also advertising a specific book
• New non-fiction in the up-coming week includes:
  • The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation
  • The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945
  • Rise of an Empire: How One Man United Greece to Defeat Xerxes’s Persians [The true story behind the events in 300]
  • Flowers in the Blood: The Story of Opium
  • Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived

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Title: 

The Long and Whining Road is about one of the craziest road trips you can possibly imagine. Simeon Courtie and his wife, along with their three children, took one year to circumnavigate the globe…in a VW camper van! By the end of their journey they had driven over 18,000 miles, visited 17 countries, and sung sounds by The Beatles in most of them to raise money for UNICEF. This is the story of the many amazing places they visited and the great people they met along the way.

I hate to say this because I think it’s one of those cases where I’m the problem, not the book. However, the first half of this book really dragged by for me. I felt like their were far more vivid sensory descriptions of their later stops, starting in India. The first half was an occasionally funny, but mostly dry and factual account of what the family did. At the same time, I was stressing about a presentation and feeling overwhelmed by my book review schedule, so it’s possible my experience of the second half of the book is a more accurate representation.

I first started to feel connected to the family and like I was sharing their experiences when they reached India. There  were beautiful place descriptions and fun travel stories, but also some grappling with tough decisions when their itinerary had to change. Even tougher were the social issues they had to confront during their travels, a very enlightening and moving thing to read about. The humorous bits of the book included pop culture references which I typically liked, some breaking of the fourth wall which I typically didn’t, and some dry humor which was funny but rarely so much so that I laughed out loud. At the end of the day, I think I’d recommend this most to people who like a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and/or fans of travel memoirs with a humanitarian side.

Amazon|Goodreads

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