Full disclosure: I received this book as a gift from the author. Yes, authors, you heard that right: you can send me your book, and I will read and review it. Hey, I’ll make it even easier for you: it doesn’t even have to be your book. You can send me any book! I have just a few suggestions if you aren’t sure what I would like. This message brought to you be the Organization for Ben Likes to Read Books.

So here we are again. The Epic series had kind of fallen off my radar for a while. I read the previous book, Hero way back in 2009! So it has been quite some time since I last hung out with Scott Remington and the Fourteenth of Novosibirsk. That’s a shame; I don’t exactly have time to re-read Hero, so I had to rely on any kind of recap available in Glorious Becoming to remember what was going on. Some of it came back easily, while other parts are probably still missing. The tight arc for this series’ plot and characters means that you are better off starting with the first book.

Four books in and Scott and his comrades are fighting a war that doesnt make sense. Aliens—the Bakma, Ceratopians, and Ithini—attack Earth intermittently, and the Earth Defense Network (EDEN) repels them. Why would aliens send down ground troops when they can just wipe us out with some carefully-placed tactical nukes? Or devastate our communications by detonating nuclear devices in the upper atmosphere? Or sneeze on us with their alien germs? Ground invasions make no sense.

But Lee Stephen knows this. It’s part of the plan. The war is a facade, a means to an end, and in Glorious Becoming, that end starts becoming clearer. (It is not, at least from the human perspective, all that glorious.) Up until now we’ve only had the fuzziest notion that what Judge Benjamin Archer and his co-conspirators are doing is not above board. Now the specifics of the situation are coming into focus, and it’s not good. The Bakma and Ithini are pawns; the Ceratopians might be good guys; there’s another alien species out there that holds one sex of each species hostage to ensure their obedience … I won’t go into spoiler territory here, but suffice it to say that if the previous books left you frustrated by the vagueness of the conspiracy angle, Glorious Becoming delivers some much-needed information.

I’m loving the conspiracy, not so much the uncovering of it. At times, Scott and the Fourteenth resemble the kids from Scooby-Doo, though they don’t so much split up and look for clues as they do sit around carefully honing their theories. Except that, from a few disparate pieces of information and some suspicions, they manage to close in on the truth rather easily. To be fair, Stephen lampshades this, with Svetlana pointing out that one can’t just jump to conclusions … but they kind of do. Moreover, the entire scene struck me as a clumsy way to advance the plot and move our protagonists from ignorance to enlightenment. Four books in, I’m glad we’re starting to get traction on this, but I could have gone for something more subtle, something as stylish and cleverly executed as the devious plot against Novosibirsk orchestrated by Archer. That was cool.

So Archer, Blake, and the other conspiring judges are bad guys, right? Yes. Maybe. I don’t know … they’re lying, certainly, but it also seems like they genuinely believe what they are do is in humanity’s best interests. It’s a fine line, and maybe they’ve crossed it—but we don’t have all the information yet. This moral ambiguity is what keeps Glorious Becoming’s antagonists from slipping down the steep slope of nefarious villainery right down to the moustache-twirling bottom. They are probably doing the wrong thing—but maybe they are doing it for the right reasons?

Isn’t that, after all, what Scott and his crew spend most of their time doing? Glorious Becoming really kicks off after Scott, Esther, Jay, Auric, and Boris are sent to Cairo on a clandestine operation. That’s right: EDEN operations being sent to spy on another EDEN base. That General Thoor is one messed up dude. The trouble is, Scott, despite all the things he has done during his fall into the Nightmen, is still a nice guy. He likes (maybe more than likes) his new commanding officer, Captain Natalie Rockwell. She likes (probably more than likes) him. So he wrestles with the ethics of lying to her, pretending to be the genuine article when in fact he is planning to betray her and orchestrate a Ceratopian jailbreak before returning to Novosibirsk. At the same time, he has to deal with the fractures within his squad as a result of conflict between him and Esther and Varvara’s cuckolding of Jay from the previous book. Oh, and Thoor keeps holding Svetlana over Scott’s head like a … well, like a hostage.

The acronym for the situation is “FUBAR”. Or, in this case, “VUBAR”, since Stephen insists on using made-up profanity. But it is messed up: ethically, politically, and personally. War is hell.

While we’re on the matter of personal problems and Scott and Esther and Scott and Natalie (and Scott and Svetlana, for that matter) … can we please stop having all these women fall for Scott? I know he’s rugged and handsome and has that Midwestern All-American Heart-of-Gold Good-Soldier Award grafted to his chest … but it’s just awkward. It’s not that Scott’s a Mary Sue—he certainly has his flaws—but he can’t go for a walk without stumbling over a chick who’s hot for him.

Glorious Becoming also adds an unconventional cast member: Tauthin the Bakma has an expanded role. Scott makes some progress communicating/interrogating him, and Svetlana does even better. Not only does his alien perspective provide a valuable source of exposition, but I always enjoy when we get to know “the enemy” better. Svetlana’s compassion, and Tauthin’s decision towards the end of the book despite everything else he does, provide an intriguing set up for things to come even as they demonstrate that not all is black and white. Some enemies are enemies, some could be allies, and some are probably a fair way in between.

It’s difficult for me to compare this book to its predecessors because of the large gap—but I’ll try. Whereas the previous books have focused a lot on action and chronicling Scott’s rise through the ranks to a position of leadership, Glorious Becoming puts on the brakes in that respect. There are a few action scenes—particularly the harrowing sequence after Scott’s team’s cover is blown in Cairo—but the bulk of this book consists of suspense and the gradual unspooling of mystery. Thanks to the clandestine operation at Cairo, Archer’s plot against Novosibirsk, and yes, the romantic shenanigans, Glorious Becoming is a solid story in its own right. On the other hand, in many ways it also feels like a bridge into the next book, where I presume the new political reality in which Scott finds himself will require dramatic changes in tactics and priorities.

Military science fiction, particularly near-future stuff, isn’t always my cup of tea. I’m more about the technology and its implications, and aside from some cool fighter jets and an alien spaceship, that’s largely absent from the Epic series. Fighting a war against extraterrestrials has led to a few advances, but from what we get to see, life outside the military is pretty much like it is in the present day. What the series lacks in gadgets, though, it makes up for in story—intriguing ideas about wars that aren’t really wars and alien chess games in which Earth, and humanity, are just a tiny corner of a galactic gambit.

My reviews of the Epic series:
← Hero

I’m working my way through Assassin’s Creed III now. It’s slow going because I don’t devote a lot of my free time to it (I have to read, after all). I’ve been playing this series since the first game, and next to Mass Effect, it’s one of my favourite games. It combines stealth, combat, and storytelling to very good effect. The first game was very repetitive, but Assassin’s Creed II and its two sequels elevated the game to a different level. Assassinating people has never been more fun.

I wanted to learn more about real assassinations through history. Rather than read a book about a single famous assassination, I was looking for something that would survey several assassinations and comment upon them. So a book called Assassins and Assassinations sounded like exactly what I wanted. Indeed, Paul Donnelley delivers exactly that. However, this might be a case where what I wished for isn’t actually what I wanted.

Donnelley writes each chapter like a newspaper article. It’s full of dry facts, parenthetical commentary on people’s dates of birth, and details and minutiae. Each sentence is packed full of the maximum amount of information it can bear without breaking. Seldom does Donnelley devote space to a lighter tone; almost everything is factual. Similarly, he injects little of his own opinion or asides into this flow of information.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, some people might prefer it. I’m just not one of them. When I read non-fiction, I like my authors to let their personality shine through their words (the exception, of course, would be purely academic literature, but that isn’t the case here). I can’t help but feel that if Bill Bryson wrote a book about famous assassinations, it would be twice this thick and include several anecdotes about his time in the Appalachians. And I’d give it five stars and buy copies for all my friends.

Tone aside, I can’t fault the comprehensive and detailed nature of Assassins and Assassinations. Donnelley has compiled an extensive selection of assassination plots, from Julius Caesar to the attempts on Hitler’s life and, naturally, the assassinations of such presidents as Lincoln and Kennedy. This is one informative, sometimes interesting book. It’s short enough that it isn’t a slog, especially if you don’t try to consume it too quickly. Rather than ploughing through it, I took it a few assassinations a night.

So if you’re looking, like I was, for a book about assassinations, you can’t really go wrong here. It doesn’t have the flair that I look for in my non-fiction; that might not be as big a deal for you. At the end of the day, Donnelley traces the combination of plots and chance that take people’s lives, start wars, and end eras. So many key moments in history involved an assassination of some kind, and many more assassinations remain heavy in our minds because of the people involved or the aftermath they caused. Assassins and Assassinations recounts all the details with a stark, no-nonsense approach.

Full disclosure: I received a copy of this story free from its author. Loves me the free short stories.

At the time I write this, I have 196 followers on Twitter. I’m pretty sure most of them are bots of one kind or another, because that number seems rather inflated. I have 147 Facebook friends. I have 97 followers on Goodreads, though again, many of those may be automated people attempting to profile me or lie in wait to sell me things. I’d be interested in seeing a social graph of my Goodreads connections, in seeing how my various friends and followers are connected. As a mathematician, I’ve studied graph theory and love how its applications become more and more important as the Internet’s social layer deepens. Who talks to whom? And for how long?

When it comes to the identities behind the entitites following my online activites, though, does it matter if they be human or machine? The latter might seem less real, less important, but perhaps the converse is true. After all, machines—or shall we say, algorithms—are often what make the difference in the online give-and-take. Algorithmic trading happens faster than humans could ever hope to follow. Similarly, algorithms following a human’s activities and reacting to those changes in reputation might have more of an impact than the slower, organic followers.

“Snow Falling” taps into the recent trends of gamification and reptutation-tracking. It’s a world where the metrics of the online persona are everything, and all actions are worth watching, rating, reviewing. The more someone does something worthy of applause, the more their reputation rises, and the more they receive gifts and sponsorship that could make the difference between making rent or moving out. Though Robert Harken doesn’t go into much detail about the state of the world in this near-future, it feels very much like the general, somewhat bleak and dour atmosphere that permeates the post-cyberpunk pages of Moxyland or Virtual Light. Civilization hasn’t collapsed so much as let itself go, and the gap between the rich and the poor has become a wall guarded by wilful blindness.

Harken splits the narrative into two streams. In the first, two newscasters follow the ascension in reputation of someone working under the alias “Snow”. In the second, an impoverished young woman named Kate labours as Snow to collect and sell as many gifts as possible to keep her and her mother alive while staying anonymous online. Apparently, that’s a terrible breach of etiquette, because the government pulls out an entire SWAT team just to find out Snow’s real identity. As Snow’s reputation swells and the SWAT teams close in on Kate, the story becomes a race to see who will fall first—and faster.

It’s cool that we get to see the story from these two competing angles, and it is an efficient way for Harken to show how this world is subtly different without resorting to too much exposition. As the hysterical reaction to Snow’s anonymity demonstrates, this is a post-privacy world, where everything and everyone is watched at all times; in fact, their reputation depends on it. But this has its drawbacks, because there is no way to ditch one’s old identity and start anew. Or at least, if one manages to do that, one has to be careful not to garner too much attention, lest the SWAT team come a knockin’….

As a science-fiction story, “Snow Falling” does what good science fiction should: it speculates about our society and about the people in it and how all that might change in the future. However, the trappings that Harken uses to do this could stand some scrutiny. For example, we regularly see Kate enter her login details to assume her Snow persona, and her password is “deprecated”. Even in this era of computing that password—a dictionary word!—would not pass the sniff test. This, for an account that has attracted global attention for its skyrocket ascent to fame? Any such account would necessarily be the target of numerous hacking attempts. Kate seriously needs to rethink her security strategy.

In many ways this story is a little over the top. There’s the bubbly, very false atmosphere of the newscasters, which reminds me a lot of the decadent and loud personalities of the hosts in The Hunger Games movie. Then there are the characters like the Deputy Vice Minister of External Affairs, and the antiphonal motto, “Disclosure begets honesty. Honesty begets accuracy. Accuracy begets order. Order is peace.” The whole story has a “Harrison Bergeron”, Kurt Vonnegut-like quality to it. That being said, I don’t see “Snow Falling” as a satire of post-privacy so much as an honest attempt to explore what some of the implications of a culture of post-privacy reputation munging might entail.

In that respect, I finished this story feeling almost certain it would have worked better as a novel (or at least a novella). There are just so many little ideas packed in here, from Kate’s mother’s unjust arrest and wildly ironic rehab addiction to the system by which online personae receive gifts from sponsors (in return for doing … what … exactly?). As far as the world and its characters go, there’s enough for a novel here. The plot would need some thickening (so that it could then be stretched like taffy); as it is, the short length lends itself well to the atmosphere of tension that Harken creates, and I don’t think the same kind of “race against time” conflict would work as well if this became a novel—not without a few more twists and turns. But there is plenty here that hints at the deeper ideas Harken wants to highlight, questions about the nature of truth and the best way to use technology to facilitate democracy, and in a short story, highlighting is all that is possible.

Although I might have issues with the length, I’m still satisfied by the story, and in particular the ending. It’s a tragic but poetic ending with just the right hint of hope. Kate might be beaten, but only temporarily, only set back rather than defeated. She has risen before, and she’ll do it again. Such are the vagaries of living by online reputation. Whereas much of the story highlights a news broadcast or Kate’s online actions, the ending is firmly grounded in the real world, with plenty of emphasis on the physical, even visceral nature of Kate’s life. It’s a reminder of the fragile and ephemeral nature of the online personae we create: Snow fades away because, for all her dazzling notoriety, none of the relationships she forged were meaningful or genuine (as we see in the tragic case of Amy_207). That’s not to say that online relationships are always shallower or less real than offline ones, just that they require the same type of commitments. The Web is still relatively young, and this is something we are just starting to figure out. It will be interesting to see how our online and offline interactions continue to intersect and overlap in the next few decades. “Snow Falling” provides a stimulating glimpse at one possible equilibrium, and one person’s struggle to game the system.

Certain things just make Canadian public broadcasting awesome, and the Massey Lectures are one shining example. For one week, since 1961, with a few exceptions, CBC radio has broadcast annual lectures on a topic from philosophy or culture by notable figures. These lectures now get published in book format. Douglas Coupland’s most recent novel, Player One, is an adaptation of the lectures he gave in 2010. Now Neil Turok, a noted physicist and current director of the Perimeter Institute, has had a go. With The Universe Within, Turok brings the very big and the very small to the forefront of public consciousness as he looks at cosmology and quantum physics and where science and society are going from here.

Just as the Massey Lectures themselves excite me, so too do books on science. There’s just something so decadent about sinking into a good book explaining how the world works, and how we know this how the world works, and of course, all the affairs and scandals the people who learned how the world works had while learning it! Science and the history of science are intensely fascinating concepts. Turok has done his best to recap the better part of twentieth-century physics, with brief trips further into the past to bring us the origins of scientific thought in Anaximander and Pythagoras’ Greece.

Turok begins with a passionate encomium of the power of science and mathematics to explain our world. Calling it “magic that works”, he explains the origins of quantum mechanics, the most recent (and probably biggest) revolution in physics. From Max Planck to Einstein to Hawking and himself, Turok points out how quantum mechanics—which is normally only good on the small scale—could help us answer one of the biggest questions of all: how did the universe begin? He intersperses this tale with more personal stories of growing up in South Africa, Tanzania, and England, and of his own efforts to help raise the profile of science in Africa. (Indeed, Turok’s perspective as a native of South Africa allows him to speak about the challenges facing African nations with an authority few renowned scientists possess. Let’s hope that changes as Africa produces more renowned scientists!)

The links that Turok draws between quantum mechanics and cosmogony are interesting. The classical big bang theory and its inflationary addendum are the most well-known origin theories, but they have their drawbacks. Most notoriously, the big bang theory inevitably results in a singularity at time zero—a point where our mathematics are unable to make sense of the initial conditions of the universe. We can explain what happened 10^(-43) seconds after the beginning of the universe, but not what happened at the beginning. That’s why some physicists, Turok included, are championing a cyclical theory of big bangs—and they are hoping quantum mechanics will help them prove it. Cyclical big bang theory side-steps the singularity problem through clever theorizing and equally clever math. It also offers an answer to another nagging physics problem: fine-tuning.

Physicists have, since the middle of the twentieth century, been able to summarize all of physics quite concisely. In fact, they can do it with a single, beautiful equation. It involves quite a few constants whose values have been measured or calculated to great precision—but we don’t know why the constants have those values, other than that if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. Hence the anthropic principle: the universe is the way it is because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be around to see it. The cyclical big bang theory negates the need for the anthropic principle, because it sees the birth and destruction of infinitely many universes.

Of course, having a theory and sensible is one thing. Having evidence is quite another, and that’s what Turok needs next. I knew that gravitational waves are a predicted but not yet observed phenomenon of general relativity. I didn’t know that detecting long wavelength gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation would lend strength to inflationary theory! It’s cool to find out how some of the experiments currently being conducted could affect contemporary competing theories. On a related note, this might be one of first books to note the discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider. Turok doesn’t mention that the Higgs’ existence hasn’t been officially acknowledged; we’ve detected a particle that is almost certainly what we’d call the Higgs boson, though we still need a little more data to call it a day. But I forgive him because he’s probably very excited. So am I!

In the last part of the book, Turok shifts focus from cosmology to computer science. He explains the role of physics in developing computing and pays particular attention to the possibilities that might open up if we get quantum computing working. With a brief detour into Teilhard’s Omega Point and some name-checking of Marshall McLuhan, Turok settles down to discuss some of the difficulties facing us in pushing science to that next level. I sense that this is supposed to be the most important and profound part of the book, but it comes off as the weakest and least substantive. After an interesting hundred pages on the history of physics and the origin of the universe, the last chapter is a mixture of blue-sky enthusing for the future and realistic evaluations of our current challenges. In the end, it didn’t really leave me excited or inspired, though I certainly found the book informative and sometimes entertaining.

The Universe Within is part cosmology, part history, part philosophy. The first two are excellent in every respect. The last part has its moments but doesn’t quite integrate with the rest of the book. Perhaps this is a result of its adaptation from lectures, for the entire book has moments where it seems to lack focus or direction. Turok is at his best when he is explaining the link between history and physics—the how we know what we know part—and for that alone, this is a good book to read.

When I first began Kilimanjaro, I was worried it was just Kirinyaga, Take Two. I enjoyed Kirinyaga but felt no need for a repeat performance. It turns out that I was right but for the wrong reasons. Kilimanjaro stands apart from Kirinyaga, with different themes even if it has a similar setting.

The main character, David, seemed just as arrogant about the superiority of Maasai ways over Kikuyu ways as Koriba was about the superiority of Kikuyu ways over European ways. David is remarkably naive for a historian, constantly espousing optimism even when it's obvious that the situation won't turn out well. Rather than being an obstinate mundumugu who insists that it's his way or the highway, David is an open-minded historian who looks to compromise for solving his problems. This is an important difference between the two protagonists.

The juxtaposition of a desire to maintain traditional lifestyles in the face of increasing urbanization and assimilation that worked in Kirinyaga returns in Kilimanjaro, to good effect. The Maasai attempt to learn from the mistakes made on Kirinyaga. They know that returning totally to a traditional lifestyle is impossible, that the "damage" has already been done. Nevertheless, there's still a sense that a certain erosion is happening, as seen in the story with Sokoine the laboni. Even though the role of the laboni over that of the doctor remains paramount on the manyattas, Sokoine finds more and more pastoral Maasai opting for hospital care instead of witch doctor care. Similarly, toward the end of the book, Kilimanjaro opens itself up to tourism in an attempt to make its big game park an economically self-sustaining entity. But as David explains, tourism means the need for tourist accommodations, tour guides, space ports (and gift shops!), banks, etc.

The message is not that traditional ways of living are doomed but that society is always changing (although the former may follow from the latter depending on the nature of that change). We can't always control that change. Even we do manage to direct it during our lifetimes, there is no guarantee things won't spiral out of control when we are gone. As Blumlein puts it, "Utopia isn't the end result at all, but rather the simple act of striving for that result?" Hence, Kilimanjaro rather baldly states its theme. It is not as subtle (nor as ambiguous) as [b:The Dispossessed|13651|The Dispossessed An Ambiguous Utopia|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166571463s/13651.jpg|2684122] in its analysis of utopia, but that makes it no less worthy a book.

Resnick explores what happens when cultures collide, especially along generational and gender lines. I'm torn, when comparing the two books, whether I prefer Kirinyaga or Kilimanjaro. The latter does feel like a repeat, but I prefer its protagonist. On the other hand, Kirinyaga had better stories. Koriba was quite clever when in some of his solutions, and watching him execute a plan was a pleasure. David, in contrast, tends to sort of stumble through his conflicts, trusting on the rationality of people to result eventually in some form of resolution.

So I think my conclusion is . . . read both. They're really the same book, or two halves of one book, the Janus of utopian literature. Kilimanjaro makes you think differently about Kirinyaga than reading the latter just on its own; vice versa for the former. I can't say much for Resnick's ability to create characters or compelling plots; neither of those things are present here to any great degree, and these are the only two books of his I've read. He does know how to put science fiction to good use though.

I read math books for fun. I realize that, right away, this puts me in an unusual portion of the population. It’s not just my fancy math degree that makes these books attractive. However, I do think that there are some math books written for people interested in math (whether professionally or amateurly), and then there are math books written for people who, usually thanks to a bad experience in school, have sworn off math like they said they would swear off cheap booze. Our Days Are Numbered is one of the latter. In a passionate and personal exploration of shape, algebra, geometry, and number, Jason I. Brown illuminates the fundamental mathematics behind some everyday tasks. While some people will still run away screaming, others will hopefully begin to see math in a new way.

Among the topics Brown explores are: converting between units, using graphs to display data, the meaning behind averages, the role of chance in decision-making, networks and coincidences, prime numbers in cryptography, fractals in art, and the math behind the mystery of the Beatles’ Chord. Each chapter is bookended by a short, two- or three-paragraph anecdote related to its given topic. For the main body of the chapter, Brown gradually develops some of the math behind common tasks. For example, he shows how an understanding of ratio and conversion factors makes converting between units a breeze without any memorization (aside from the factor itself, of course). Later, he explains why the Web and social networking has guaranteed that graph theory will remain a practical and important field of math for a long time.

This is not really my kind of math book, and that isn’t even because of the audience or the way Brown presents the math. Rather, I read math books for the story. I’m interested in math books that take a specific topic and explore its history, its present state, and the different ways to interpret it using mathematics. Our Days Are Numbered instead covers a variety of topics. There isn’t anything wrong with this approach. However, each of these topics can be (and has been) the subject of entire, weighty tombs. It’s difficult for Brown to do them justice. Sometimes, such as with the chapter on conversion factors, he does a very thorough job. Other times, such as with his explanation of prime numbers and Internet security, he leaves something to be desired.

Also, much of one’s enjoyment will hinge on how one much one likes or dislikes Brown’s writing style. As the chapter titles and subheadings demonstrate, he is a man of corny humour, easy puns, and deprecating remarks towards himself and fellow mathematicians. I can get behind the first and third attribute, and I can ignore the second. Although I think a book any longer might have begun pushing its luck, as it is, I enjoyed Brown’s conversational and easygoing style. Others will find it overbearing and intrusive, however, and there is no escape from it here.

So, Our Days Are Numbered isn’t my mathematical cup of tea, but could it be anyone’s? Well, one way in which this book excels is Brown’s unrelenting insistence that math is useful, relevant, and not at all scary. As a math enthusiast and math teacher, the opposites of these sentiments besiege me constantly. I love how Brown comments on the somewhat unique reception math receives at parties:

When I tell people what I do for a living, the most common response is a look of dismay, followed by “I always hated mathematics!” This statement is made with relish and without a hint of embarrassment. I don’t think there is another profession out there that gets the same response. Do people state they’ve always hated English? Music? Lawn care? I think not.

Tongue-in-cheek, Brown touches on a very crucial and deplorable fact: hating math is socially acceptable. It’s cool to disparage math and one’s ability to do math. To some extent, the aura of nerdery surrounds all of the STEM fields, but scientists and engineers get a little more recognition—people’s eyes might glaze over if one announces oneself as a theoretical physicist, but there is a little gleam of gruding respect. Mathematicians, however … what do they even do?

The social acceptability of disparaging mathematics troubles me. Math is the foundation of the other three STEM fields. Science, technlogy, and engineering are all fields that require creative, passionate thinkers. Yet from an early age we send children signals that math is a dull, uncreative subject and it’s OK to hate it for being boring and irrelevant. This is nothing short of educational sabotage. It’s certainly fine for people not to like math, and I understand how parts of the educational system foster that feeling. But we should do everything we can to avoid reinforcing that notion, especially among our children.

Hence the power of this book. Brown takes it as a given that math is a useful, powerful tool in the everyday world. He isn’t out to convert everyone to a science or engineering job. He isn’t trying to shoehorn calculus into a discussion of changing a car tire. (As a teacher, the incessant call to include real-world applications and contexts in my lessons wearies me at times.) He is careful not to insist that everyone uses or needs all of this math all the time—you don’t need to know how to use prime numbers in order to keep your online banking secure. But isn’t it nice to know why it is secure?

Brown’s non-evangelical stance is refreshing, though it can also be a little frustrating. Our Days Are Numbered lacks a true, cohesive message, aside from the idea in the title. With no introduction and no conclusion, Brown relies on the title and the chapters to come together to create that singular idea. While not essential, some kind of introduction or meta-narrative would lend additional structure to this otherwise scattered text.

With brilliant mathematics, hardcore mystery-solving, and no small amount of humour, Our Days Are Numbered is a well-written and very successful math book. It isn’t anywhere close to my Platonic ideal of what a math book should be—but that’s me being picky. Nor do I think, in the long run, that people convinced math is uninteresting or “not for me” will find their convictions toppled by anything in here. But for anyone who is open to learning about the role of math in everyday life, there is definitely something here, waiting to be read.

I have been meaning to revisit John Irving lately. I’ve been re-reading War and Peace over this Easter break, but I wanted to take a break between each book within the novel and read something else. So I took a look at what the library had to offer for Irving, and I thought this would be a good time to re-re-read The World According to Garp. This is the first Irving novel I ever encountered. A somewhat imposing mass-market paperback of it lives somewhere in my dad’s house. It was one of that corpus of books that lives in your parents’ house before you’re even born, precedes you into the world and (with any luck) will survive your passage out of it. Such books tend to float around the house, surfacing at the oddest moments and in the weirdest places. And I know it’s my dad’s favourite Irving work.

I’ve read The World According to Garp twice before, once when I was young and once when I was younger than I am now. The complexity of the relationships and issues that Irving tackles in his books means that reading them at such different ages naturally leads to very different impressions. Reading it now for the third time, I reflected to my dad that it seemed much more absurd to me. Indeed, the situations and events that plague Garp throughout his life range from the simple and believable to incredible or even ludicrous. Some have compared this book to a soap opera, and I suppose there’s some truth to that. It’s more comedy than opera though.

Considering the depth of tragedy that happens in this book—car accidents, rape, assassination—calling it a comedy might seem … insensitive, at the very least. Yet it’s accurate, for comedy is the genre that, through the absurd, reveals very important truths that we might otherwise overlook in everyday life. The comic characters of this novel—Fat Stew Percy (all the various nicknamed Percys, in fact), the incorrigably likable Dean Bodger, the reluctant Jillsy Sloper, et al—balance out the brutal nature of the events that happen to Garp and his family. Both the comic and the tragic elements of the book are larger than life, as fiction tends to be. And the tragedy is not so much a punishment for the actions of Garp or others as it is a consequence of the inevitability of bad things happening to people (good and bad).

There are a lot of different routes this book might take to get into a reader’s heart. Parents might identify with Garp’s somewhat overbearing sense of worry, his desire to make the world safe. I can’t really remember what grabbed me the most about this book when I read it before (this is one reason I enjoy writing reviews these days), but I’m certain it wasn’t the feminism that stuck with me this time around.

The World According to Garp begins by recounting Garp’s conception and birth. It explains how Jenny Fields, a nurse and member of the rich New England Fields family, struggles to maintain her independence in the midst of a society and time that is suspicious of single, independent women. Jenny conceives Garp in an unorthodox manner and proceeds to raise him, defiantly, on her own. Later in life, when Garp is virtually an adult and verging upon independence himself, Jenny composes a memoir—A Sexual Suspect that transforms her into a feminist icon. Though Jenny opens her doors to women throughout her life, she herself remains reluctant to engage with that label or the discourse surrounding feminism. Though she has no quarrel with prostitution and liberal views on sexuality, Jenny consistently marvels at the phenomenon of lust and expresses bewilderment at how it operates (particularly in men).

Garp lives his life in the shadow of his mother’s fame and struggles with this in relation to his budding reputation as a writer. He isn’t just “T.S. Garp, the novelist” but “T.S. Garp, the son of noted feminist Jenny Fields”. Inevitably, his books get reviewed in this light. So when, in the prime of his life, an accident befalls his entire family and influences him to write a bizarre, semi-absurd soap opera treatment about rape and infidelity, it isn’t surprising that this polarizes critics. As is usually the case with such controversial works, there are feminist reactions on either side—just showing that there is seldom a universal reaction to anything as complex as literature. Some critics praise the novel as a deep and moving look at how rape affects a woman’s life, while others condemn it as paternalistic and insensitive.

Garp’s complicated relationship—familial and literary—with feminism is what lingers after I finished this book. Garp attends his mother’s memorial in drag, for it is more a rally for the women’s movement in memory of the icon they made out of Jenny Fields than it is a tribute to his mother, the person Jenny Fields—and at such an event, it is implied, the presence of a man would not be countenanced, and particularly not someone as despicable as T.S. Garp. Here, and at other points in the novel (such as the love life of Roberta Muldoon), Irving gently probes the edges of the idea that there are certain spaces reserved for particular expressions of gender, and those spaces—often in an attempt to make sure they remain safe—can be hostile to other genders.

This navigation of such spaces interests me. A friend on Facebook recently posted, “Can a man be a feminist and chivalrous, since chivalry is inherently sexist?” One woman replied, “Can a man be a feminist?” I would hope that most feminists, and some men, would answer in the affirmative—I identify as a man, and I also identify as a feminist! Yet the question articulates a very real issue within feminism. And it’s certainly true that those of us who perform gender as straight men have a different relationship with, and a different role in, feminism than would someone who performs gender differently.

So I look at the somewhat hostile and close-minded performances of feminism by some of the characters in this book (the Ellen Jamesians are, naturally, the major example) and reflect that similar issues persist in feminism today. It seems strange that in thirty years we haven’t made much progress in that respect. All this divisiveness and polarization seems so counterproductive; polemics and invectives against other feminists are a waste of time that could be better spent advancing gender equality. (And I’m not referring only to the inclusiveness of genders within feminism; there are also plenty of conflicts within the widely heterogeneous movement that is “feminism” with regards to its relationship to anti-colonialism, anti-racism, etc.)

The World According to Garp highlights how that essential aloneness that plagues us as individuals can conflict with our need to build institutions and -isms. The Ellen Jamesians think they are somehow paying tribute to Ellen James through their actions, even though she is mortified by them. Jenny’s various followers or admirers view her as a icon even though she doesn’t embrace the label “feminist” so much as allow others to label her. We have a need to interact with others, but we have to do it through something as clumsy and unwieldy as words. And sometimes, it’s just so hard to know what to say.

This theme reverberates through the writers and writing exhibited in this book. Garp is a writer, but his writing doesn’t seem to really go anywhere throughout his life. His first published short story, “The Pension Grillparzer” seems to be one of his best works, rivalled only perhaps by his unfinished novel. Writing constantly occupies him, even if the act of writing seems to elude him most of the time. And it seems to me that Garp is struggling—perhaps in vain—to finally figure out how to say what he wants to say (and perhaps this is all any writer is ever doing). “The Pension Grillparzer” is a way of communicating his experience of Vienna; it is also a deed done to prove his worthiness as a writer to the exacting Helen Holm. (I’d love to go on to analyze Helen and Garp’s marriage, but I’m not sure I’m up to the task. I suspect that anything I could say on the matter would ring unbelievably naive, considering my own lack of experience with such matters.) The World According to Bensenhaver is a reaction to a tragedy that inevitably revokes any feelings of safety he might have in the world.

Garp isn’t the only writer. Jenny publishes a memoir long before Garp publishes any work. Michael Milton, the only student to catch Helen’s eye, is also a writer. According to Garp, neither of these two have much ability as writers. Both, however, offer contrasts in terms of attitude towards their writing. Jenny is “done” with writing after she completes A Sexual Suspect. She undertakes the project because she feels like she has something to say, and she is equanimous about its controversial yet fervent reception after its publication. Milton is prolific but perhaps lacking in much raw talent. This confidence, in contrast to Garp’s wavering sense of purpose in his writing, is attractive to Helen at that time in their marriage; perhaps it reminds her of the confident Garp who sent her “The Pension Grillparzer” as a prelude to proposing.

Irving’s treatment of feminism and feminist politics stand out this time around, but I was also drawn to how he discusses writing. All in all, The World According to Garp has interesting portrayals of communication and the ways in which people succeed or fail to communicate with each other. We spend a great deal of our time attempting to make connections, to be together. We form families and friendships; we engage in intimacy and sex with people we know (or don’t know); we write and read and speak. At the end, though, we are still always individuals, always alone, always terminal. And when we do go, we leave behind us a great body of words, for others to read and examine and theorize about from now until the end of time. We can never control—and seldom can we predict—how people will interpret what we write. But when we do go, that’s a major part of what we leave behind.

I really need to stop going into bookstores. With a title like Why Rousseau Was Wrong, how could I not buy it? It didn’t help that the author, is the dean of the local cathedral, was sitting behind the table with the last two or three copies, and engaged me in a nice conversation before offering to sign the book for me. I didn’t quite mention that I was an atheist. Perhaps she suspected from my tone or body language—at least, probably, she suspected I was irreligious or agnostic. So, I was a little sceptical that a book about the importance of the Church to modern day Britain would be for me. But I do make a point of reading books that challenge my preconceived notions and engage me, and I suspected this book would do so.

The title of the book, as well as its subtitle, Christianity and the Secular Soul, hints at Ward’s thesis. She is arguing against the received notions of individuality handed down from Enlightenment thinkers (she targets mainly the long line of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau but spares some time for a sideline exploration of Hegel, Nietszche, and Foucault later in the book) and taken as an integral part of the secular soul. Ward argues that this emphasis on individuality, coupled with an intense devotion to utilitarian ends rather means, has made a significant contribution to a sense of cultural and spiritual impoverishment that fuels events like the 2011 London riots. Ward believes the Christian faith—and, to be specific, the type of community predicated upon a Christian Church, like the Church of England—holds the solution to this spiritual impoverishment. I hate books that point out flaws in society but don’t actually offer any solutions, so I’m quite happy to read about how Ward thinks the Church can succeed where she believes secular humanism has failed.

In Part One, Ward takes care of some definitions—what exactly she means by the secular soul, secular humanism, etc.—and takes aim at liberal egalitarianism. In her view, this approach to thinking is too simplistic in its definition of equality:

In Western culture individuals are led to believe that each “has the right” to consider herself equal to everyone else. However, she soon learns that she is not equal: there are people who are greater and lesser than her—in all sorts of ways: more beautiful, less intelligent, poorer, more friendly, healthier, less patient. Bauman argues that in a society where worth is measured primarily in materialist terms, then that sense of “equality” can quickly turn sour, fostering resentment against those who have more material goods.

Secular humanism ditches the concept of faith in a deity, leaving a void—spiritual impoverishment. We fill this void with physical goods—materialism. But because wealth is not equally distributed, not to mention all sorts of other attributes, we can’t be equal on a materialist level, causing the sort of resentment that can result in rioting. Hence, Ward argues that Britain has become “brittle” as a consequence of this impoverishment. She wants to re-focus the notion of equality by grounding it in the Church: we are all equal under God.

I think Ward makes several valid observations about the dangers of materialism and the somewhat nihilistic obsession with wealth, fame, and status that permeates a lot of Western culture. The “American dream” of riches resulting from simple hard work and perseverance largely a myth fed to the masses. Media help to keep us caught in a constant negative feedback loop of self-image: buy this to look like that; eat like this to feel like that; do this to be regarded like that. I can understand the appeal of the simple, spiritually-based egalitarianism that Ward is proposing.

While Ward makes the case, then, that the Church might be a sufficient vector for egalitarianism (and there are all sorts of deeper issues with the inherent discrimination of the institutional ideological praxis that I’m just ignoring right now), I don’t agree that it is a necessary vector. I think it’s possible to have a secular soul that is still rich in spirit, in a moral if not religious sense. I don’t agree that morality is informed only by religion, and I think it’s possible to arrive a state of society where we are secular, moral, and spiritually rich. (That state of spiritual richness, though, requires an awareness and appreciation of our religious—and predominantly Christian, in the Western world—heritage that some secular humanists don’t always acknowledge.)

In Part Two, Ward seizes upon Edmund Burke as her heroic sceptic of Rousseau and his Enlightenment buddies. She examines the Enlightenment’s gradual departure from the Christian philosophy that dominated prior to the seventeenth century, and she links the Enlightenment’s well-meaning conclusions and endorsement of democracy to the terrors of the Terror, the Jacobins, and later, communist dictatorships. She links the secular soul that emerged from the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the individualist fulfilment of “forced” liberty at the expense of social cohesion, to the dangers of a direct and unchecked democracy. As far as I can tell, her argument is that we need a certain configuration of bodies of authority within our governance structure—and in her view, the Church is an essential such body.

It’s hard to argue with some of these conclusions, in the sense that, yeah, the Enlightenment did cause lots of people in France to go off the rails for a little bit. It seems a little equivocal to focus on these failings of the movement, however, while acknowledging but dismissing the comparable failings of Christianity as an institution. Ward is happy to admit that numerous bloody actions have been commmitted in the name of the Christian faith, but she doesn’t draw the same conclusion that she does from her critique of the Enlightenment thinkers. In both cases, political activists have seized upon a conveniently popular philosophy for their own ends. The Enlightenment and the Terror are both products of a larger dissatisfaction with the corrupt state of absolute monarchy in Europe at the time.

Ward also succumbs, briefly, to a somewhat romantic view of other cultures—primarily “Eastern”, Asian ones—and their notions of family and society. She lauds the corporate nature of such families, with more than two generations living under one roof, and a healthy respect and veneration of one’s elders. Fair enough—Western society could make it easier for elderly people to maintain their dignity as they age, and this is a problem we will confront in the next few decades as the Boomers start to retire. I would agree that our emphasis on individualism bears some of the blame. That being said, Ward employs a stereotype of the wise, serene Asian culture when she implies that the vast network of diverse traditions and corporate philosophies that seem to permeate Asia is as holistic or beneficent as it would appear to the outsider. China v. Tibet anyone?

Part Three of Why Rousseau Was Wrong focuses mainly on the Anglian Church as Ward’s metre-stick for what a Church community can offer. And I get it. I really do. I understand what makes the Church awesome. I recognize that, regardless of what one actually believes, church congregations are an excellent source of community and friendship. They provide a reassuring sense of stability and understanding. And the Church offers what we all need at some point or another: forgiveness. So, if Ward’s premise that society needs to become more corporate to be less brittle is true, I agree that the Church could a sufficient source of that spirit, albeit not a necessary one.

This is the central point of my resistance to Ward’s attack on secular humanism: it’s not done yet. Christianity took thousands of years to become what it is today—it is still in flux, still evolving and adapting to the changing needs of its flocks. Why can’t we extend the same tolerance towards secular humanism? By this I mean that it’s unrealistic to expect people to develop new philosophies that somehow spring fully formed from the head of Zeus without so much as a flaw. Ward is very quick to argue that religion is an essential component of being human. I’d argue we’re still trying to figure that one out, and these centuries are just growing pains in that larger experiment. It’s backward to assume that just because certain applications or derivations of secular humanism haven’t produced the best results that the only or best course of action is to retreat back into religion. We are bound to stumble and make more mistakes in our search for alternative social paradigms.

I’m less resistant to Ward’s overarching argument regarding corporatism versus individualism. I think she makes some good points about our obsession with utilitarian thinking and ends versus means. Part Four of Why Rousseau Was Wrong is all about education and how Ward thinks it should change. I’m very ambivalent about this part of the book.

On one hand, I have now been exposed to two different types of education systems. In my home province of Ontario, we shuffle students along until high school, at which point they need pass a certain number of courses to earn a diploma and graduate. The marks they get in those courses are less important, relevant really for scholarships and post-secondary applications than they are for job opportunities. Here in England, education is much more standardized and test-driven. Students get shuffled along with their year group, regardless of their achivement each year, then sit standardized tests. Consequently, unless there is any kind of coursework involved in the subject, the teacher has no determination in the student’s grade: the teacher exists merely to prepare the student to sit the examination. And the tests are so dry, so boring, that such preparation and revision often seems like a thankless and dull task—it’s no wonder students check out and become uninterested in school!

So I’m sick and tired of telling my students they need to learn something or do something because “it will be on your test” (and there is plenty on those tests that they learn because it is on the test, and only because it is on the test). I try, when possible, to provide other, extrinsic explanations of the value of their knowledge. But in the end, it’s the same: an instrumental approach to education instead of an attempt to foster an intrinsic love for learning. Le sigh.

On the other hand, the way Ward describes her discontent with the education system makes me somewhat leery. I think she is approprating the term child-centred education to criticize particular facets of the education system that I don’t view as essential to its child-centredness. To me, child-centred education begins with the basic notion that children are different—and this does not have to be associated with ideas of individuality. To facilitate learning, teachers must be aware of these differences and employ different strategies that make sense for different groups of children. Finally, child-centred education is usually constructivist, in that it prefers to allow children to experiment and discover knowledge instead of simply wrapping it up and presenting it to them as a gift. In my view, this better fulfils Ward’s desire for an intrinsic love of learning anyway.

I’m also uncomfortable with Ward’s emphasis on education’s role in teaching character and moral values. In particular, she naturally advocates for Church-run schools or schools that provide English students with a grounding in Christian traditions. While England does have an established church, unlike many other Western democracies, I don’t think this should mean that students need a “church education”. I’m still not sure to what extent educators should be shaping youth in terms of moral values and character. By all means, teach citizenship and an appreciation for religions, including Christianity and its historical impact on English society. However, I worry about distinguishing between teaching an appreciation for Christianity and teaching that it is some kind of authority.

As for the overall philosophical argument of corporatism versus individualism and the Church’s ability to foster the former, I think Ward has highlighted several pressing problems with British society, and while I am not fully on board with her solutions, I appreciate her attempts to provide them. Why Rousseau Was Wrong is a very detailled and high-level analysis of these issues. It contains the type of balanced and considered argument I would expect from an academic, and for that reason I’d happily recommend it to people who share my lack of faith (Darth Vader finds this disturbing). However, her arguments often seem over-broad compared to conclusions that are somewhat narrow; in her attempts to pitch the Church as the best solution to this problem, she chooses to approach secular humanism from a very specific epistemological starting point. It seems to me that there are more alternatives, that Rousseau was certainly wrong about many things, but that the secular soul still has some life left in it.

P.S. This book is inexplicably on a list of “Awful Authors”, which seems upon further investigation merely to be a list of books critical of rationalism or humanism. At the time of this writing, I am the only one who has reviewed or even rated this book on Goodreads. I contacted the person who added this book to the list, imploring them to remove it from the list or at least read the book and rate it before judging it prematurely. To date, I have not received a response. I’m disappointed that someone committed to secular humanism would take such a dogmatic approach rather than keep an open mind.

I can’t resist picking up mathy books when I’m in a bookstore. As a mathematician, I love broadening my knowledge about the field—and seeing what passes for “popular mathematics” these days. Thinking in Numbers is a slim volume that promises to “change the way you think about maths and fire your imagination to see the world with fresh eyes”. It didn’t do that for me—but maybe that’s because I already think about maths that way. Daniel Tammet is an exceptionally talented voice when it comes to presenting the inspirational elements of mathematics, so I hope that for people who don’t quite understand why I get so excited about maths, the book does make a difference.

I last wrote about why I love math in 2011. Since then, I’ve graduated from university. I’ve completed research in mathematics and had a paper published. I’ve begun teaching math and English at a high school level. All of these changes have deepened, broadened, and otherwise changed my love for math. As a student, math can be a mystery, a puzzle that demands both ruthless logic and amazing creativity, something that can tickle both the left and right hemispheres of the brain. As a teacher, I’ve tried to make my math classroom as “safe zone” where students can learn, and indeed where they can express a dislike for math, if that’s their opinion. Of course, I’m always out on a little bit of an evangelical mission to change people’s minds. But I’m not asking people to love math; I’m just asking them to reconsider whether they actually hate it, whether they are wrong when they say, “I just can’t do math”. Everyone can do math; everyone does math every day. Math is an integral (no pun intended) part of our society. And it’s just wonderful.

Tammet captures a lot of these sentiments in Thinking in Numbers. This is a very unusual math book, in that it isn’t really about math. It’s a collection of 25 very short essays on topics that relate to math tangentially. There are precious few equations or formulae in this book. Instead, Tammet takes a what I might even call an intersectional approach to math. In one of my favourite essays, “Counting to Four in Icelandic,” he explores how different languages form words for numbers. Some languages, Icelandic included, have completely different words for the same numeral depending on whether what it describes is abstract or concrete (whereas, in English, we just say four regardless). In another essay, he ponders the recurrence of the motif of nothingness and synonyms for zero in Shakespeare’s works. He connects this to the spread of zero, from the Arabic world through Italy to the rest of Europe, during Shakespeare’s time.

The essays are bite-sized. This is a book easy to devour over the course of a few evenings: read a few essays, then put it down and mull over them before going to bed. There is a preface but no conclusion, and there is no overarching connection or theme, beyond Tammet’s obvious love for the relationship between life and math. On a related note, the topics are quite varied. There is little to suggest a pattern beyond different connections between math and life that have occurred to Tammet over the years. This might prove frustrating for people who are used to more forthright or even argumentative non-fiction. Tammet isn’t so much presenting an argument as opening the door to another perspective on the topic. It’s an invitation, not one side of a debate.

Tammet’s writing style always verges on the intimate and philosophical, and he always leans on anecdotes or autobiographical details to furnish his asides. This can work well—I wasn’t familiar with his name, so his account of memorizing and reciting 22,514 decimal places of pi for a new record was fascinating. His essay expounding upon mathematical models using his mother as an example, less so. The book is at its best when Tammet takes a concrete piece of mathematics—pi, calculus, primes—and links to another field, whether it’s the literature of Tolstoy or the possibilities in a chess game. In this way, he demonstrates how math is more than just a series of problems in a textbook, and it’s not just something mathematicians, physicists, and engineers need in their daily lives.

It’s this pervasiveness of mathematics that comes to the fore in this book. The dearth of equations, proofs, and even diagrams attests to this: Tammet is not out to explain mathematics. Instead, he finds and traces the connections between math and life. He talks about how an Amazonian tribe that lacks names for numbers conceptualizes the world. He examines Tolstoy’s use of calculus as an analogy for analyzing history. Having recently read War and Peace, I really enjoyed those little allusions to math. For people who only see the epic as this massive work of literature, however, it might seem strange to think that Tolstoy owes his view of history to math. Tammet teases out the cool, unsuspected ways that math can pop up and connect to parts of our lives, and it’s wonderful.

Not every essay in this collection is amazing. I’d probably recommend this to most of my friends, with the caveat that they shouldn't read the book all the way through. Instead, this is a collection where it's appropriate to leaf through the chapters and read those that pique one's interest. Tammet covers enough topics that there is probably at least one essay in here for everyone. I was sceptical, when I saw the title of the book and read the brief description, that Thinking in Numbers could impress me. It looked so thin, so insubstantial, that I expected it would be too light, too far on the popular side of popular mathematics. Instead, Tammet delivers something that I wasn't anticipating at all—and it works.

Maps are sexy. They are rich founts of information in text and picture form: layers of semantics crowded on rectangles or squares of paper, pixels of possibility on a 3D representation of the world. They are an essential form of communication, but they are often overlooked. Let’s face it: we take maps for granted. This is especially true now that Google and other companies have made it easy to explore the Earth virtually. As these tools become commonplace, the technology fades into the background and becomes more like a pencil (a piece of technology, but one so familiar as to be rather unremarkable) than a supercomputer. So it behoves us to stop and consider the staggering achievement that is mapping, particularly when so much of what we know stretches all the way back to a time before we had precise ways to measure time and space. Contrary to popular belief, the ancient Greeks figured out that the Earth was round pretty quickly. And Plato’s imaginary depiction of the Earth as observed from space is similar to what we actually found when we finally made it up there in the twentieth century.

Jerry Brotton has written a history of the world, and he chose to do it through maps. Make no mistake, though: A History of the World in Twelve Maps is mostly about maps. Shocking, I know. For the history component, he traces the social and scientific forces that influenced the production of the different maps he discusses. He links mapmaking to the search for knowledge as well as our desire to organize that knowledge. Finally, he explains how different maps served different purposes—some practical, some political, but all philosophical. Mapmaking is both a science and an art, but regardless of its classification, it is an ideological exercise.

One striking thing about this book is its remarkable evenness. I find that with non-fiction that takes a segmented approach like this, most books tend to be uneven: a few chapters are very interesting, most are reasonably interesting, and then a few are just not that satisfying—kind of a normal curve of chapter quality, if you will. This isn’t the case here. I’m not saying that every chapter is amazing, and I raced through some while lingering in others. But every chapter is informative, interesting, and intriguing in its own way. Brotton has selected a good sample of maps throughout the ages. He begins each chapter by introducing the map (or mapmaker) before backtracking, explaining the historical context in which the map arose. From this, we come to understand how the drive for the acquisition of knowledge in Alexandria influenced Ptolemy’s groundbreaking maps based on geometry. We learn how the relationships between China, Japan, and Korea influenced the mapping of North Korea in the sixteenth century. We learn how revolutionary France delayed the completion of the most ambitious survey project for its time, and property disputes in England resulted in British Africa and India being better-mapped than the UK.

Got all that? Good, there’s a test at the end.

As you might have gathered, there is a lot in this book. It was a good deal, considering that it comes with two sections full of colour plates of various maps. Brotton has obviously done the research (which, much to my pleasure, he has meticulously documented in endnotes). The result is an information-dense look at history and mapmaking, and while this is never boring or dry, at times it is a little overwhelming. I’m not sure how much I will retain a month or a year after reading this book.

This is always a danger with these kinds of books, and it’s a difficult pitfall to avoid. By covering so many topics, even with the depth and interest that Brotton displays, A History of the World in Twelve Maps becomes little more than a survey of world history. Entire books can be (and have been) written about Ptolemy, or revolutionary France, or Mercator. Still, this is a minor complaint—and, considering I’m complaining about how much the book tells me, not really a complaint at all. If anything, this just means that I have a better idea of which books to seek out next....

In this respect, A History of the World in Twelve Maps reminds me a great deal of A Short History of Nearly Everything, a similarly sprawling survey of history through the lens of scientific discovery. I love the latter so much, and while Brotton’s style isn’t quite as engaging or stimulating, he manages to replicate a lot of the sense of wonder that Bryson creates. He communicates how polarizing the use of maps was in sixteenth century Europe, when Castile and Portugal were fighting over the rights to the entire world. He replicates the excitement that must have been palpable for those mapmakers involved in the surveying of eighteenth-century France. These days, maps are a commodity (or a service)—then, maps were a staggering achievement of science, art, and engineering.

As a mathematician, I particularly enjoyed when Brotton mentioned the mathematics behind mapmaking. The Earth is round (an oblate spheroid, to be pedantic about it), and it is not possible to project the curved surface of the Earth onto a 2-dimensional piece of paper with perfect fidelity. You either get distorted areas or distorted angles (or both), which means your map will look funny, or it will be useless for navigation, generally considered two very important aspects of a map. For as long as we have been making maps, we’ve tried to determine the best way to approximate the 3-d curvature of the Earth on a 2-d piece of paper. (Brotton also goes Borgesian and talks about how we can’t have a "perfect map" unless the scale is 1:1, which would be silly. I remember talking about this back in my Philosophy of Science class days.) Now, for those of you who have been reading this paragraph and are about to scramble wildly to cancel your Amazon order, wait! There are no complicated equations in here, no mathematical sleights of hand. Brotton merely mentions the tricky and impressive math involved (or highlights when some, like Mercator, deduce a projection without knowledge of the math involved). So it’s possible to appreciate the beautiful and necessary mathematics here without becoming drawn in too deep.

Of course, as with any survey-type book of history, there are things that Brotton left out that I would have liked to see. He laudably devotes a chapter to China and Korea, but the rest of the book is very much about the Western world. Absent is any discussion of Australian Aboriginal songlines or the mapping techniques of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Brotton describes attempts to map Africa but spends no time discussing how the indigenous inhabitants found their way around for tens of thousands of years. Of course, it’s true that many of these cultures don’t have maps in the conventional sense; they rely on oral tradition and reckoning by the sun and the stars. Even if that is the case, Brotton makes a passionate plea for a very open definition of a map in his introduction. He doesn’t want to limit himself to discussing small rectangles of paper—and so, it would have been nice to see him branch out some more.

The book is at its best when Brotton explains how the desires or aims of a government or an individual influenced the development and deployment of maps in that time period. (I was very fascinated by his recounting of the conflict between Castile and Portugal and Magellan’s subsequent, ill-fated circumnavigation.) He makes it very clear that mapmaking is not something done in isolation; it is a political and philosophical activity that relies as much on the allegiances of the mapmaker as it does the objectivity of the Earth’s landscape and geography. The premise, telling the history (or selected parts of history) through maps is quite cool. Brotton largely succeeds at what he sets out as his mission in the introduction. At times the information he includes is a little much for a book of this type, but that’s not a deal-breaker. With amazing maps and enthusiastic explanations, Brotton educates and captivates.