ASRC 2022 Week 6 (7/25-7/31/22)
- Ridgewood Public Library
- Jul 25, 2022
- 2 min read
Hello and welcome to Adult Summer Reading Club 2022 Week ! Don't forget to register. And if you need a refresher, here are the rules. For any newcomers, you're in the right place. You can comment on this week's (or the most recent week's) post. No need to go back to week 1.
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Here are our staff reviews for the week:
Elias: This time around, I rolled a 5 and landed on one of the spaces I was dreading the most: Science and Math. I knew any book here would take me a bit and it happened to fall on a week I was pretty busy. I ended up only getting around a third of the way through the book but that third has been very interesting!
Death from the Skies by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame is a look at all the ways the apocalypse could happen thanks to objects or phenomenon from space: solar flares, gamma bursts, meteors, and the like. You'd think it'd be a bummer of a book but it's actually not. Plait keeps things moving and never lets it get to dour, though he is very good at impressing upon you just how bad these things could be.
Part of what keeps the book enjoyable rather than absolutely terrifying is the lack of sensationalism, other than the fun pulpy opening segments of each chapter, and his insistence on putting in the real odds of something happening and then the real odds of something happening in our lifetimes or even in the next 10 lifetimes. The writing is clear and communicative, exactly what you want from a science communicator, and I feel like I'm learning not just about what would happen but why as well.
I doubt my opinion of the book will change by the end. Unlike most fiction books or a non-fic book with an argument/whole-book narrative, each chapter essentially sits on its own and there little that would make the rest retroactively worse. Unless it gets exceedingly dull, I guess. I don't see that happening.
4/5 stars
We'll see you back on the 1st of August for the start of week 7!
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