Frank Swain (Ed.) - This Book Will Blow Your Mind (New Scientist, 2018) *

Let marketeers have their way, and you end up with a book title such as this one. In reality, This Book Did Not Blow My Mind, for a number of reasons.

First, it's a compilation of very short and easily accessible factoids about a zillion different topics, from nocturnal sun to computers and physics and chemistry and biology.

Second, there is no big picture. There is no relationship between the topics suggested, other than that they ever appeared as articles in the New Scientist. And for every topic selected, there may be a hundred other topics that easily qualify for publication. So you get a lot of trees, each three to four pages long. But there's no wood. There's nothing linking these factoids. And some of the factoids are even less than that, and they present only a theory that's as yet not further investigated.

Third, and maybe because of the second reason, this is not truly science. There's no effort to understand what's happening, or why. It's as boring as reading the Guiness Book of Records.

But I guess that's how marketeers work.

Next time, it would be better to let the scientists do the work.