Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. In the epilogue to the latest edition of The Selfish Gene ( see my review here ), Richard Dawkins marvels at modern techniques in genomics, which can reveal the geographic and demographic traits of our ancestors. As an appropriate follow-up to that book, I decided to read Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived , which Mr. Dawkins himself apparently considers "stimulating" and "right". The title of the book seems to be inspired by A Short History of Nearly Everything , but that's just my hunch. Needless to say, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is not literally about everyone who every lived. Rather, it is about the history of the human species viewed through the lens of genetics (in combination with some archaeology, anthropology and so on). But in a sense it is  about every per...

Book Review: Niall Kishtainy, "A Little History of Economics", Yale University Press, 2017/2018. When I read Nigel Warburton's "A Little History of Philosophy" a few years back, I really enjoyed it for its clarity and brevity. So I was excited to pick up another book in the Little Histories series, and what better than one that tickles my fancy in economics? Hence A Little History of Economics , written by a UN policy adviser and LSE teacher by the name Niall Kishtainy. Reviewers have described this book as "highly readable", "accessible", "fast-paced", and "nontechnical". I agree. The book is over 240 pages long, but is divided into 40 chapters, meaning that the average chapter is only 6 pages, so it feels  like a breeze to read. The writing style is concise, with snappy sentences. Each chapter begins with a drawing related to the topic, which helps to liven things up. Besides these sketches, there are basically n...

Book Review: Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Black Swan, 2016. "Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so." (p. 20) Bill Bryson wants us to know how lucky we are to be here today, given that most of the universe is dead and most of the species that have lived on Earth are extinct. As he writes in the introduction, the book is "about how it happened -- in particular, how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since" (p. 20). No wonder the book is titled A Short History of Nearly Everything . Part of the author's motivation for w...