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Standalone book review
Sep. 19th, 2017 09:25 pm#77: Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. 3.5.
Disclaimer: I was sent a review copy in exchange for a fair review.
I probably got the review copy because I loved an earlier Sam Kean book, The Violinist's Thumb. In that book, Kean did a deep dive (for laymen) into our genetic code, with each chapter organized around an amusing story that tied into the theme of that chapter. It was deeply researched, very entertaining, and quite informative.
Here, he tries the same formula...only it never quite gels.
So this one is about gases. Just that--gases in general. There's sort of a vague progression of "beginning of the Earth" gases through "the order in which we discovered stuff" gases to "what we might find one day on other planets" gases. But while the genetic code is a topic that you can go incredibly deep on but has some fairly well defined boundaries, gases are...well, by nature, they're amorphous and don't much like being contained. So this is chock full of insights, but they're really barely connected to each other. There's no actual story here.
And the amusing anecdotes accelerate this problem instead of corralling it. They're really, really random. And he goes far, far deeper into them than actually necessary. (For example, we get multiple pages of learning the life history of a guy who got blown up by Mount Saint Helens. Because...gases were involved in the explosion. Or something. It's entertaining! But really doesn't actually have much more to do with gases than say, my own life history. Because I've played with helium balloons! Or something.)
So. It's deeply researched. (Maybe too deeply, more deeply than is justified.) Very entertaining. (Really! Kean's writing style is delightful! Accessible and funny, and great at putting complex concepts into laymen's terms.) Quite informative. (Did you know the French Revolution can be blamed on a volcano in Iceland?) But it's less a book and more a multi-hour binge on Wikipedia, where you keeping clicking the most interesting link on the page and learning more and more fascinating stuff, none of which has anything to do with each other, and end the evening feeling stuffed full of random knowledge which might be fun to pull out at parties some day, and maybe a little headache-y. (Or maybe that's just me?)
Disclaimer: I was sent a review copy in exchange for a fair review.
I probably got the review copy because I loved an earlier Sam Kean book, The Violinist's Thumb. In that book, Kean did a deep dive (for laymen) into our genetic code, with each chapter organized around an amusing story that tied into the theme of that chapter. It was deeply researched, very entertaining, and quite informative.
Here, he tries the same formula...only it never quite gels.
So this one is about gases. Just that--gases in general. There's sort of a vague progression of "beginning of the Earth" gases through "the order in which we discovered stuff" gases to "what we might find one day on other planets" gases. But while the genetic code is a topic that you can go incredibly deep on but has some fairly well defined boundaries, gases are...well, by nature, they're amorphous and don't much like being contained. So this is chock full of insights, but they're really barely connected to each other. There's no actual story here.
And the amusing anecdotes accelerate this problem instead of corralling it. They're really, really random. And he goes far, far deeper into them than actually necessary. (For example, we get multiple pages of learning the life history of a guy who got blown up by Mount Saint Helens. Because...gases were involved in the explosion. Or something. It's entertaining! But really doesn't actually have much more to do with gases than say, my own life history. Because I've played with helium balloons! Or something.)
So. It's deeply researched. (Maybe too deeply, more deeply than is justified.) Very entertaining. (Really! Kean's writing style is delightful! Accessible and funny, and great at putting complex concepts into laymen's terms.) Quite informative. (Did you know the French Revolution can be blamed on a volcano in Iceland?) But it's less a book and more a multi-hour binge on Wikipedia, where you keeping clicking the most interesting link on the page and learning more and more fascinating stuff, none of which has anything to do with each other, and end the evening feeling stuffed full of random knowledge which might be fun to pull out at parties some day, and maybe a little headache-y. (Or maybe that's just me?)
