Customer Reviews:
 Frippery city August 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Think of chocolate cake dipped in honey, sprinkled with powdered sugar and then drizzled with maple syrup. Blech!
Apparently, Angier has noted that the world of nonfiction has had to make due without its own version of E. Annie Proulx, and decided to fill that gap herself. (This is not a compliment.)
But I hate to be hard on her, because she is performing a real service, and obviously is quite bright and more than willing to dive into a tough subject and work until she understands it. But if her stated goal is to make the basics of science more accessible to people, why make us read in dread of the next strained metaphor or lame pun? It's hideously distracting.
(For the record, you can't really address a compendium of basic science without mentioning J. Willard Gibbs, America's greatest and most obscure science titan.)
 not amused July 27, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
"Too cute by far" is a better title for a review, but I see it's already taken. If you like Ms Angier's articles in the NY Times, as I usually do, you will be disappointed in this book. If the tone in those articles is as grating as in this book, maybe I didn't notice because they are so much shorter. After 50 pages I was ready to pull my hair out with all the flippant asides.
The Canon July 14, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Don't waste your time or your money. I throw very few books in the garbage, but this one had to go in.
The errors are too much June 23, 2008
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
It's amazing that in a book which contains an entire chapter on Thinking Scientifically, Ms. Angiers commits one of the ultimate sins in science writing: the dissemination of information without bothering to check if it is actually correct. The discipline of referencing every "fact" presented in science writing (something this book fails to do) is important because, aside from allowing the reader to discover the evidence that a particular "fact" is based on, it forces the author to make sure that what they are presenting is actually CORRECT. The number of errors in the later chapters of this book (chapters 5-9) are far too many for a book aimed at non-scientists.
Some of the errors are minor and show only a slight misunderstanding on the author's part, but her explanation of why planets don't twinkle (they do twinkle, by the way) is wince inducing. And I'm sure it would be a surprise to many botanists that plants, in general, don't respire during the day time. This is the sort of laziness that I would expect from a tired middle school student writing a science report late at night the day before it's due, not what I would expect from a prize winning science writer in a book that had actually been EDITED.
I'll let others harp on the unhelpful language throughout the later chapters and the cheerleading mess of her chapter on evolution but would rather leave potential readers with this: Do not take anything you read in "The Canon" for granted until you confirm it in a trusted second source. This should go for anything you read but goes doubly so for this book.
 A very fun tour through the basics of science June 6, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The author provides a very fun tour through the basics of science - not at the "how to solve the equations" level, but at the "how and why this is fun and important" level. The chapters follow nicely one after the other. The writing style helped this be a page-turner for me, with zing and zest on every page. The two major drawbacks of the book (and they're minor ones) is the significant number of uncommon words, and the large number of North American cultural references. The tone of the book is decidedly rationalist, which could make it less palatable to those with fundamentalist leanings.
The author very intentionally focuses on the fundamental areas of science and scientific thought. She manages to cover all the major bases in a way that interconnects and makes sense. Chapters that go over material that have not been my favorites in general science classes helped me to sit up and take notice of the fun and wonder in those areas as well. I'd recommend this book to anyone who'd like to learn about the world around them better in an easy and fun way.
The chapters cover: 1. Thinking Scientifically, 2. Probabilities, 3. Calibration, 4. Physics, 5. Chemistry, 6. Evolutionary Biology, 7. Molecular Biology, 8. Geology, 9. Astronomy.
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