Katherine Eban – Bottle of lies
Impressive and concerning whistleblower story illustrating the subtleties in developing and producing effective generic drugs.
Katherine Eban – Bottle of lies
Impressive and concerning whistleblower story illustrating the subtleties in developing and producing effective generic drugs.
Walter Isaacson – The Code Breaker
History blessed the author with a pandemic that made his subject even more topical, but unfortunately he could not resist the temptation to make it more a memoir than a biography.
Simon Winchester – The perfectionists
Nice collection of anecdotes which struggles to become more than just that.
Neil de Grasse Tyson, Richard Gott, Michael Strauss – Welcome to the universe
The great thing about this book is the emphasis on HOW we know what we know about objects that are light years far away that are to our eyes not more than a dot in the sky.
Margriet van der Heijden – Denken is verrukkelijk (“Thinking is delicious”; in Dutch)
Thorough biography of Paul Ehrenfest and Tatiana Afanassjewa.
Hakeem Oluseyi – A quantum Life
Impressive and heart-warming life story
Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why
The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible women
Great exercise in spotting biases, and understanding how these manifest themselves in how the world around us is shaped.
The detailed synopsis of (what seems like) every book, play, or movie that ever mentioned rabies gets boring pretty fast.
Brian Christian – The most human human
Unfortunately, the book does not explicitly challenge if humans are adequate judges in the Turing test.
Jordan Ellenberg – How not to be wrong
A cornucopia of charming mathematical anecdotes and facts
The purposeful one-sided rant makes the book lose all credibility, in particular since the arguments can easily be reversed – especially in the wake of Trump’s desperate challenge the US election outcome.
Benjamin Labatut – When we cease to understand the world
A highly entertaining fictionalized history of landmark scientific breakthroughs.
Filled with highly interesting statistics about the evolution of public perception on ethical issues.
Richard Holmes – The age of wonder
Conveys lively how science was considered an undertaking for daring adventurers.
Violet Moller – The Map of knowledge
Well narrated account of how Christian and Muslim scholars traveled the world in search of ancient knowledge and preserved it through diligent copying.
Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The imitation game
A quite complete account of the life and death of one of the most fascinating figures of early computing.
An elegantly narrated exploration of mathematics , heavily lening on our intuition for time and space (thereby defyingL.E.J. Brouwer‘s adaption of Kant).
Line of argument that primary characteristic of humans as a species is their social behavior dovetails nicely with Daniel Dennett’s thinking on evolution of memes.
Mark Miodownik – Stuff Matters
Skillfully composed , mind-blowing narrative at different scales.