Book Reviews - February 19´

The books are reviewed in a very subjective way— on a 5-star scale.

On this post the reviewed titles are:

- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

- Paper Towns by John Green

- Brief Answers to Big Questions by Dr. Stephen Hawking

- We Have No Idea by Daniel Whiteson and Jorge Cham

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil Degrasse Tyson

★★★✬☆

“We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.” — Ch.12, Pag.90

“The power and beauty of physical laws are that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.” — Ch.2, Pag. 20

And…

“Yes, Einstein was a badass” — Ch.6, Pag. 43 — Please read this whole passage, it is fucking amazing.

This is a particularly small science book. Since I left Mexico I, purposely, have focused some of my reading to specific sciences (mostly physics) and other academic topics. Astrophysics for people in a hurry is a perfect example of a very well written, compact, and good science book. I read this book in a span of 4-ish days in LA, and 2 weeks after that, I went through it again by listening to the audiobook in two-ish days, narrated majestically by Neil himself.

I would recommend this book as an entrance into astrophysics science. It is one of the best, if not, the best-explained book I have ever read. As someone that has had multiple experiences with entrance science books, I can say that some of the information is repeated even in books within this same post (e.g. the Dark Energy and Dark Matter concepts), nonetheless, it is always refreshing to hear new explanations and analogies. Science communicators, I have discovered, have their own unique way to explain concepts and to put those same concepts into perspective. Neil Degrasse Tyson has excellent comedic timing and such a talent of using it within his explanations. By far my favorite chapter in this book is Neil´s closing arguments— “Reflections on the cosmic perspective.” A close second is chapter 9— “Invisible Light.”

I give this book three and a half stars.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera

★★★★✬

“I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.” — Part II - Soul and Body

“loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.” — Part IV - Soul and Body

“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?” — Part V - Lightness and Weight

“The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. (Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)” — Part III-A short dictionary of misunderstood words- Light and Darkness.

I am perfectly aware that I am biased towards this book. Many of the people that I like, or have liked—a surprising amount of my friends to be honest— have told me how great this book is. And I do not have anything to argue about, it is fucking amazing. Albeit, I can say that I have never had the pleasure of discussing this book with someone that picked up the same things as me. Maybe, for yourself, it is the perfect definition of what love, passion, and relationships are. Perhaps, more courageously, it represents the utopian idea of a polygamous relationship or even a template on how to achieve it—yes, I have heard this argument and had this conversation before, more than once. Regardless if this is your own case, it is not mine, you can perfectly understand why it would be someone else´s. This book is vast.

I have read this book once, last spring, which turned out to be an oddly appropriate time to experience it, and the second time this past winter. First time in Spanish and then in English. I have to say I do not have a preference towards any translation, they both are beautiful.

This book made me cry a couple of times, I fell in love with more than one character—to be completely fair, I kind of ended up conflicted with Tereza—it made me rethink many different concepts with its multiple sections of “Misunderstood words”.

In fairness of it all, I do have to warn you, as one of my best friends did to me when I was in the process of going through its pages; approach it with lightness in your ideas, since it is going to break them—and be careful and gentle with it if your dating someone, I am serious.

For showing me why my life is extremely light,

and also what weighs me down—I give this book four and a half stars.

Paper Towns — John Green

★★★☆☆

“Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.” — Ch. 1

“The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” — Ch. 24

In the case of this novel, I love, not the book itself, but the idea it tries to tackle. Also, i am pretty biased towards the author, even though this is not my favorite novel of his, I just admire deeply the way he takes on complex and important concepts and creates beautiful stories to guide you through them.

Speaking about the novel itself, it is very well written, the characters are vibrant, and the story itself is really interesting. I have read two times this book in its entirety, the first time, when I was 15, I just fell in love with Margo, the goddess-like girl. It is pretty obvious why I felt that way about her at that time. As it is why my student just took this from the entire book.

The second time I read it was a couple of weeks ago, I read it in two days in order to give the copy back to my student. And I found myself conflicted about the characters. It is fair to say that I did not like, at all, the character of Margo this time. Just as I am sure, if I met again the girl I was madly in love with when I first read it, I wouldn't be able to establish more than 15 minutes of conversation with her. Putting aside this idea, which I will discuss in the next paragraph, I do want to establish that I liked many of the references in the story, from T.S. Elliott´s “Light, the visible proof of invisible light” quote, the extensive Walt Whitman analysis, which I found to be really interesting, and of course, the mentioning of John Coltrane´s masterpiece album “A Love Supreme”.

Now, to the core idea itself, and the reason why I still love this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to read a fun and well-crafted novel. I have found that when you have this limerence spike towards someone else, it is very easy to forget about the multitudes inside her (or him), this is part of the whole “romanticist” euphoria. Nonetheless, I also have understood—more recently that I would like to admit—that failing to imagine other people complexly can be very, very destructive.

I give this book three stars.

Brief Answers to Big Questions — Dr. Stephen Hawking

★★★★☆

“So Hamlet was quite right. We could be bounded in a nutshell and count ourselves kings of infinite space.”

“In my eulogy for Stephen, at the interment of his ashes at Westminster Abbey, I memorialized that struggle with these words: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws and comprehend fully the birth of our universe, it may largely be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.” — Professor Kip Thorne

“We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.”

“Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins.”

I have not read as many books from Stephen Hawking as I would like to, especially since my goal as of this moment still is to become a cosmologist, and well, he was the fucking king of that hill. Brief Answers to Big Questions, however, gave me a particularly different feeling and turned out to be a very different experience than reading A Brief History of Time, the only other of his book that I have read. It is a pretty small and digestible book, I read it in about a day and a half, curiously, on my birthday while I was in Bilbao.

As Hawking explains, he received countless questions regarding impossibly difficult questions such as “Can we predict the future? How did it all begin? Is there other intelligent life in the Universe?”, and other seven just as hard; He restrained himself from answering most of these questions, probably to save them for this book, although, my theory, inspired by the afterword written by his daughter Lucy, is that it was a sign of humbleness. As his daughter says, He did not like to admit that we had made a contribution to science, or to that matter, to the world and humanity.

Question number one, “Is there a God”, is probably my favorite chapter, and not only because I agree with almost everything that he wrote, which is uncommon for me on a description of God and Religion, but also because I just find it hilarious, extremely ballsy, and to that extent, even kind of gangster that he waited until his last year alive to deny the existence of a God. I will say it right here: when you are young, I think, it is easier to boycott religion, God and any belief system for that matter. Ask me what I think about it a few months before I die, and I am pretty sure there will be a bigger pressure on me to fell into a calming and reassuring answer such as the existence of heaven and so on. Dr. Hawking, #Respect.

To steal a line from a CNN review of this book, “Hawking last message to his readers and humanity… is of hope.” And I couldn't agree more, even for someone as pessimistic as myself, I felt an indescribable amount of hope for humanity while reading this book.

I give this book four stars.

We Have No Idea — Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson

★★★☆☆

“Theorists are a smart bunch (in theory),”

“No.” — Ch.10 Can We Travel Faster than Light?- Pag.61

“We still have no idea how we´re going to expand what we think we know to the other 95 percent of the universe.” — Ch. 16 Is There a Theory of Everything?- Pag. 295

Jorge Cham is the creator of Ph.D. Comics & Ph.D. in Robotics, and Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist & researcher at CERN. Together, they wrote this hilarious book, highlighting the infinite ignorance of humankind.

I found out about this book on the summer of 2017, because of a video that MinutePhysics made on youtube (link at the end), and the next day I ordered it from Amazon and two days later there it was in my doorstep.

This book accompanied me through my travels that summer, in which I enjoyed way too much. Fast Forward a year, and I decided to take it with me when I was leaving Mexico. The first things that I want to point out are that it really is that the contents of this book are amazing, and all the questions it tackles are equally interesting. This is a book for someone who has an interest in Theoretical Physics but maybe does not have the time nor the conviction to read heavy technical books. It is extremely well explained. And, also it is really amazing that you can talk to the author on Twitter—he has responded to me a couple of times.

Besides that, I do have to say that after that first time that I read it, I found it too silly and just flooded with stupid and silly puns, but hey, that could be just me. And in all fairness, I did crack open into laughter more than a couple of times reading it. It is a great, with no doubt, a great read. I would recommend reading this, perhaps, after Astrophysics For People in a Hurry, to get a broad introduction of the field.

To make sure if you would like this book, and if the jokes and humor is your cup of tea, I highly recommend this video of MinutePhysics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCK5oGmRtxQ

And also this talk of Daniel Whiteson himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRaNySAmoPg

I give this book three stars.