There was too much pop in this pop science.
Which I grant is extremely rich coming from me, who hates reading anything with the data attached. And yet I wanted more and definitely more than the extremely vapid conclusions about how we spend our time that the book leaves us with.
The anecdotes were good, but the actual sense of it as a history of science was...well, exactly like someone stretched a longform journalism article into a book. Just not a good way.
Also, based on the amount of time this book spent on justifying the slow food movement as more than a bunch of weirdo hippies relative to the amount of time it spent acknowledging and grappling with British imperialism and colonialism, I got the impression I was not the imagined audience for this book.