radina's review
2.0
I started this book in February 2020, and there's a reason it took me almost a year to finish it.
I found the book's prose overcomplicated and dense - not in the material itself, but just in how the author phrased things. Often he'd use multiple sentences where (it seemed to me) half would do, making reading through this a bit of a slog. On the other end of the scale, the pictures scattered throughout, while a nice break from the text, were overly simplistic and contributed nothing to the reader's understanding.
Subject-wise, the topics the author covers wander here and there without any sense of why they're being discussed. It was really hard to pick this book back up once I'd put it down because I never understood the connections between sections and chapters, so I never remembered what was being discussed or why.
I did learn about some neat things from this book (naturally formed nuclear reactors!), and it did touch on some of my favorite topics (Flatland!). But in service of what point? I don't know. And the book is from 2002, so there's no guarantee of any of the physics being currently up to date. So really: you can skip it.
I found the book's prose overcomplicated and dense - not in the material itself, but just in how the author phrased things. Often he'd use multiple sentences where (it seemed to me) half would do, making reading through this a bit of a slog. On the other end of the scale, the pictures scattered throughout, while a nice break from the text, were overly simplistic and contributed nothing to the reader's understanding.
Subject-wise, the topics the author covers wander here and there without any sense of why they're being discussed. It was really hard to pick this book back up once I'd put it down because I never understood the connections between sections and chapters, so I never remembered what was being discussed or why.
I did learn about some neat things from this book (naturally formed nuclear reactors!), and it did touch on some of my favorite topics (Flatland!). But in service of what point? I don't know. And the book is from 2002, so there's no guarantee of any of the physics being currently up to date. So really: you can skip it.
More...