non-fiction Archives

Yzabel / December 6, 2024

Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 3/5

Blurb:

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Review:

I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Alright, I received a cipy through NetGalley quite a while ago, and just didn’t get to post an actual review until now. Which I should’ve done at the time for sure. Oh well. I still remember enough of the book, in any case, to be able to do so now.

This isn’t the first book by Harari that I read. Regardless of what one may think of the research itself, there is no denying that this author has a knoack for storytelling and for grabbing a reader’s attention (in a good way), all things that are a strong point when it comes to non fiction just as well as for fiction. Especially on the theme if information networks and their latest child (so to speak), the artificial intelligence, a pretty current topic.

Overall, it was quite an interesting read, and one that I would recommend, even though it wasn’t my favourite one by Harari—the latter being caused, perhaps, by the amount of information in the book, which means that each piece couldn’t be prodded in much depth. It does give food for thought, though, and a foundation for a reader to go and do more research on this or that aspect of it—sometimes, all we need is the idea of “check this out” for us to realise that, well, said topic is A Thing. That said, if you’re looking for something with, well, more depth and deeper analysis, this is not the book.

Yzabel / September 6, 2024

Review: Inside Job

Inside Job: Treating Murderers and Sex Offenders. The Life of a Prison Psychologist. by Rebecca Myers
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

And here I am. Totally alone in a cell with a convicted sex offender who is free to do what he wants. There is no officer. No handcuffs. No radio. Only the man across the desk and me. He looks more petrified than I do.

HMP Graymoor. One of the UK’s most notorious prisons. Home to nearly 800 murderers, rapists and child molesters.

Reporting for her first shift inside is Rebecca: twenty-two, newly graduated – and about to sit down with some of the country’s most dangerous criminals.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I actually received an ARC of this book a couple of years ago, but didn’t get to read it until, well, much more recently. That said, I didn’t notice any particular “artefacts” that would pointed to a review-copy-full-of-typos of anything of that kind, the book read just like what I expect the published version to be.

This was a fairly interesting account of the beginnings of a psychologist’s career in a prison, more specifically within a program geared towards sex offenders. Interesting, but also on the difficult side, precisely because of the type of work and the people it described. I’ve always found sex offenders specifically to be a very tricky subject: cases of rape are already hard enough, but when the whole thing is perpetrated on children on top of it, it reaches into even deeper recesses. In this way, the work of psychologists/medical personnel to try and understand and figure out if yes or not “something can be done” for the offenders is also tricky. Are these people truly evil? Are they sick, and if they can, can they be cured? If someone has offended once but then never offends again once in prison and then out of it, should they be stigmatised forever (which could be justified… or just as well lead to self-fulfilling prophecies where leaving them alone may have kept them on the straight path)? Or should they be given a second chance—but then, if they’re on the way to offending again, it’s akin to letting the fox inside the henhouse… All very, very tricky, and a very touchy subject indeed.

All the more because, here, it seems that the program didn’t help much in the end. And yet the author still wanted to share her experience, her findings, what happened, because the experience itself is worth recounting nonetheless.

Also, I’m usually not super keen when memoirs and true crime books include too much of the author’s personal life, because the latter can easily veer into being distracting. However, in this specific case, the parts about her own life were just as interesting. Notwithstanding the pressure and the impact dealing with sexual offenders can have on one’s psyche (especially as a young woman on her first job, with all the usual “surely she’s incompetent” that pop up in pretty much every job and sounded even worse in those circumstances), there were also some personal elements that could’ve… gone very wrong for her, as a sort of dark mirror of the people her job was concerned with. Both parts tied with each other, and I won’t lie, but there were a few moments when I was afraid something really bad would happen to her.

Conclusion: a bit of an unusual read for me in terms of what I’ll still loosely consider as “true crime”, and one that was quite hard at times—but also quite interesting.

Yzabel / June 8, 2024

Review: This Is Why You Dream

This Is Why You Dream: What your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life by Rahul Jandial
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

A fascinating dive into the purpose and potential of dreams

Dreaming is one of the most deeply misunderstood functions of the human brain. Yet recent science reveals that our very survival as a species has depended on it. This Is Why You Dream explores the landscape of our subconscious, showing why humans have retained the ability to dream across millennia and how we can now harness its wondrous powers in both our sleeping and waking lives.

Dreaming fortifies our ability to regulate emotions. It processes and stores memories, amplifies creativity, and promotes learning. Dreams can even forecast future mental and physical ailments.

Dreams can also be put to use. Tracing recent cutting-edge dream research and brain science, dual-trained neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial shows how to use lucid dreaming to practice real-life skills, how to rewrite nightmares, what our dreams reveal about our deepest desires, and how to monitor dreams for signs of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In the tradition of James Nestor’s Breath and Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, This Is Why You Dream opens the door to one of our oldest and most vital functions, and unlocks its potential to impact and radically improve our lives.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Dreams in general fascinate me. Not so much the typical “meaning of dreams” approach, where if you dream about X then supposedly it means Y, but the whole subject: we all dream, dreams are as old as humanity, and yet, like with sleep in general, they’re something so trivial but at the same time so elusive, not fully understood yet. (My own dreams are also pretty much of the WTF kind most of the time, and it is fascinating in its own way.)

The author explores some theories about why we dream here, also from an approach as a neurosurgeon. I enjoyed especially the part about nightmares, how it seems that very young children don’t have them, but they actually start when children really get deep into building their own sense of self: nightmares as “the Other/the Threat vs. the Self”, in a way for our brains to establish who we are? I can sense so many possibilities for stories here, too.

Another part I enjoyed was the different roles of the Executive Network and the Imagination Network. Most of my past, older traditional reading about dreams tended to put them in the “information processing” category, with their being some jumble of whatever we experienced during the day, and in a way I think this is also part of it anyway (at least, I do regularly find elements of my current work or personal life projects in my dreams!); but this other approach was more novel to me, and made a lot more sense when explained.

I think I may have liked seeing a few more case studies, but overall I really enjoyed this.

Yzabel / April 20, 2024

Review: The Trading Game

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blurb:

“If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?”
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. And he was good at numbers.
At the London School of Economics, Gary, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies, yet they start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day . Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all.
What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? It’s 2008 and now you have a front-row seat to the global financial crisis. A time when the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves .
Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?
This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an interesting memoir in many ways, from an ex-trader whom a lot of people must have seen as an unlikely candidate for such a job (or, at least, I bet a lot of people would expect traders to come from a more specific pool with families closely related to financial matters, for instance).

Gary Stevenson worked at Citi for a few years after university, and managed to find his place there… or did he? For not everything was so peachy, even though he made money and things looked, for all intents and purposes, as if they were going the right way… for him, not necessarily for the rest of the world caught in the 2008 crisis. And reading about that was definitely interesting, because it is no secret that as a lot of people suffered from that very crisis, there were also those who managed to get an upper hand, so to speak, and leave the table rather wealthier. Which is partly the moral dilemma that Gary went through here, finding it more and more difficult to reconcile his success with the realisation that the markets were going crazy, and soon going down in flames.

I had a bit of a harder time, though, with the portrayal of the trading world—entertaining in a way (everybody in there seemed to be a prick of some sort or other), but it’s the kind of portrayal that grows a little… stale after a while? Note: I have no idea how people behave on the trading floor, it may or it may not be that this environment is pretty toxic in general and in nature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed it was. It just grew old after a while. Also I was somewhat annoyed at the last part of the book, because in the end it read more like constant anger cum trying to get as much money as possible from Citi before leaving, but without the deeper introspection I would’ve expected from this?

Conclusion: 3 stars, it is an interesting read, the author just doesn’t come off as very reliable or relatable. (Not sure if he was supposed to be, to be fair.)

Yzabel / January 11, 2024

Review: Hidden Potential

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam M. Grant
My rating: 3.5/5

Blurb:

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty interesting read in general. Maybe not the most original theme, nor anything that hasn’t been written about aplenty, but as a condensate of examples illustrating how we have plenty of hidden potential we could tap with (but don’t always realise we can), I found it inspiring nonetheless. Inspiring for myself, that is, but also as a resource for deeper thoughts when it comes to making my way on the path of leadership, since all in all, I’m still fairly new to it. And, perhaps, it was simply also a book that reached me at the right time, in the right frame of mind? (Hello, Impostor Syndrome my old friend? Can you go back into the closet again? Thank you!)

To be fair, for someone who has read several books on this theme already, this one won’t bring anything really new, even though it reads easily and is engaging. Otherwise, it will provide food for thought.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / September 23, 2020

Review: The Big Book of Mars

The Big Book of Mars: From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet by Marc Hartzman
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the Ancient Sumerians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. But it wasn’t until 1877, when “canals” were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there’s life on Mars. InThe War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells suggested that we wouldn’t need to make contact with Martians–they’d come for us–while, many years later, Nikola Tesla claimed that he did make contact.

Since then, Mars has fully invaded pop culture. It has its own day of the week (Tuesday, or martis in Latin), candy bar, and iconic Looney Tunes character. It has been the subject of iconic novels and movies, from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles to Mars Attacks! to The Martian. And it has sparked a space-race feud between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who both hope to send a manned mission to Mars in the near future.

Filled with entertaining history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, The Big Book of Marsis the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars–yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Originally, I received an excerpt, but promptly proceeded to order the actual book once I started reading it. (The paper version itself is hefty and printed on thick glossy paper and smells good, and yes, I know, I like smelling my books.)

This book deals with how we have perceived Mars, currently and historically, whether in reality or in fiction works, starting with the Victorian period. It abunds in colourful illustrations, which makes its reading all the more pleasant – especially if you do that in little chunks rather than all at once (but really, “all at once” is very tempting, because it is definitely interesting). The style is fairly humoristic in places, making for an entertaining read on top of an informative one – perhaps even more information would’ve been good here? I can never get enough when it comes to Mars, I guess.

I couldn’t decide at first whether I liked the choice of going by theme rather than purely chronologically, but in the end, the “themed” approach worked well enough. The other way might have been too much of a catalogue of dates. Also, it makes it easier to come back to it later knowing roughly what I’m looking for (“fiction about Mars”, and so on) even if I’ve completely forgotten by then when exactly that “thing” happened.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable book, and a pretty one to boot.

Yzabel / July 17, 2020

Review: Stopping the Next Pandemic

Stopping the Next Pandemic: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Over the last 20 years of epidemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist and researcher Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics.

Debora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101–how viruses spread and how pandemics end–and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals–but it is possible.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I must be a glutton for punishment for reading this kind of book while the world is still not done with COVID-19. However, I also want to stay informed and learn things without having to wade through the dramafest that news in general have become, so all in all, this was a very appropriate read: informative, interesting, considering the ecological impact as well (no, killing all the bats is not a solution, plus it would collapse the whole ecosystem anyway), on the whistle-blowing side yet also covering what could be done (a.k.a not being alarmist just for the sake of being alarmist)… and not so depressing or anxiety-inducing as I had feared.

I didn’t know the author before reading this specific piece of her work. As a scientific journalist who’s been working that field for decades, she was able to bring her own experience and point of view, gathered from observations made on previous outbreaks, and that also gave the book a more personalised tone. In general, “COVID-19” seemed to me well-researched, easy to grasp and follow (no reliance on over-complicated scientific terms here), and a reflection on how countering such viruses is definitely not only scientists’ responsibility, but also governments’, for implementing (or choosing not to…) the policies that will help fund research and curb the spreading. (Let’s just say I wasn’t too impressed with the UK and the USA on that one… though they were far from being the only ones farting in their hands about this).

Conclusion: Perhaps not the kind of book I’d recommend to an audience who already knows a lot about SARS-CoV-2, because it reads more like an introduction—but as, well, a good intro and recap on the topic, it did the job top notch for me.

Yzabel / June 2, 2020

Review: The Better Half

The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women by Sharon Moalem
My rating: ★★★☆☆

Blurb:

From birth, genetic females are better at fighting viruses, infections and cancer. They do better at surviving epidemics and famines. They live longer, and even see the world in a wider variety of colours. These are the facts; they are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. Why? And why are we taught the opposite?Drawing on his wide-ranging experience and cutting-edge research as a medic, geneticist and specialist in rare diseases, Dr Sharon Moalem reveals how the answer lies in our the female’s double XX chromosomes offer a powerful survival advantage. And he calls for a long-overdue reconsideration of our one-size-fits-all view of the body and medicine – a view that still frames women through the lens of men.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Some things in this book I already knew (such as the role of the X chromosome when it comes to colour vision, and why many more men than woman are colour-blind). Some others were completely new to me, although also related to the X in general (immune system features, for instance, including autoimmune conditions) and I was glad I could expand on my knowledge in that regard.

The book draws a lot on genetic research, obviously, both past findings and current ones. I found it easy enough to follow, and it didn’t strike me as heavy-handed on the medical lingo, but perhaps it would be a little confusing for someone who’s really a beginner in that area, and therefore would be better targeted at people who already have some basic knowledge about genetics here?

I did find it somewhat repetitive, though (as in, keep the examples for sure, but no need to reiterate so often that a lot of it stems from genetic females having a “spare”), and the narrative style, when it uses examples from the author’s real life to illustrate certain points, wasn’t always very clear. The concept behind it and the way it is at times expressed could also be easily problematic; the term “genetic superiority” is fraught with double-meaning, after all, and I can no doubt see it interpreted in less than savoury ways. So, one has to be careful about how they approach this: it is strictly about the advantages brought by having two X chromosomes rather than one if you’re a genetic human female (or having two Ws if you’re a male bird—same difference), and definitely not about who is “superior, with a hint of who should therefore dominate the other”.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / May 31, 2020

Review: The End of Everything

The End of Everything by Katie Mack
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it went from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from dark matter to black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life. But what happens at the end of the story? In billions of years, humanity could still exist in some unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant space, finding new homes and building new civilizations. But the death of the universe is final. What might such a cataclysm look like? And what does it mean for us?

Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was eighteen, when her astronomy professor first informed her the universe could end at any moment, setting her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics. Now, with lively wit and humor, she unpacks them in The End of Everything, taking us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos’ possible finales: the Big Crunch; the Heat Death; Vacuum Decay; the Big Rip; and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more,The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley and Pigeonhole, in exchange for an honest review.]

A fascinating read, if a little too short to my liking—call me morbid but I wanted to see even more various possible deaths of the universe.

In fact, I’m especially fascinated with the vacuum decay theory (incidentally, I had read an article about it by Katie Mack some time ago, and that was what prompted me to request the book in turn). I can’t tell why this one calls to me more than the others—perhaps because, if it does come to pass, we at least know none of us will ever be aware of it, we just won’t have the time to see it coming. Perhaps because it does make a lot of sense. Perhaps because I have something with oblivion in general, or because of the author’s sense of humour that permeates her writing.

I learnt a lot here about other theories as well, which were explained in a way that made them quite easy to understand (some of them I had previously brushed on, but now I feel like I hadn’t fully understood them at the time). What will come to pass, in the end? The Heat Death? The Big Crunch? Will something, anything, get out of it, or will whatever happen put an end to everything, if we are indeed in a false vacuum now? It is scary and fascinating and mind-boggling all together, and it prompts so many thoughts. I found it more exciting than depressing, which is telling, considering when I read it (2020, I’m glaring at you, really).

Conclusion: 4 solid stars.

Yzabel / March 20, 2020

Review: How to Find a Higgs Boson—and Other Big Mysteries in the World of the Very Small

How to Find a Higgs Boson—and Other Big Mysteries in the World of the Very Small by Ivo van Vulpen
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

The history of particle physics, the hunt for the most elusive particle, and the fundamental questions the search has inspired

How did physicists combine talent and technology to discover the Higgs boson, the last piece in our inventory of the subatomic world? How did the Higgs change our understanding of the universe? And now, nearly a decade after its detection, what comes next? Answering these questions, Ivo van Vulpen—a CERN particle physicist and member of the team behind the detection—invites us on a journey to the frontiers of our knowledge.

Enjoy van Vulpen’s accessible explanation of the history of particle physics and of concepts like quantum mechanics and relativity—and ponder his inquiries regarding the search for new particles (to explain dark matter), a new force (to combine the existing fundamental forces), and new phenomena (undiscovered dimensions of space). This is a lively account of work at the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, with inspiring personal reflections on humanity’s discoveries deeper and deeper into the world of the very small.

Review:

[I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A good, solid read about particle physics in general, and the confirmation of the Higgs boson at CERN. The beginning may seem deceptively simple for a layperson who already knows the basics, but it’s obviously here to pave the way for what follows, which goes a little more into the nitty-gritty technical details. Maybe someone who really doesn’t know anything about physics might find it difficult to follow, although I’m not convinced; the way it’s explained should take care of that. It was really interesting, and a testament, too, to what a venture such as CERN can accomplish.

Also, yet another proof that we really, really need to stop funding research and experiments according to “how much money we can make off it”, because if this keeps happening, we’ll just stop making new discoveries altogether. Another interesting side of this book was how it illustrated in which (often unexpectedly) physics CAN actually lead to very useful applications, even though the research may have appeared as random at first–PET scanners, for instance: who would’ve known?

The author’s writing is easy to follow, both when it comes to the book’s structure and to its translation. I’ll have no qualms recommending it to non-physicists, and to physicists as well, come to think of it.