Dave O’Reilly’s Blog

	Superstrings and the Search for the Theory of Everything Author: F. David Peat Rating:
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“Peat grapples with these amazingly recondite notions and succeeds brilliantly in making them clear.” –Publishers Weekly

This is a great book. Here’s the thing; it was written in 1988. I did physics in college between 1992 and 1999 and this book contains more information about superstring theory than I was taught almost ten years after it was published. It’s a little bit heavy in places, and I would say that you would need more than a casual interest in quantum mechanics/particle physics/superstrings to get through it, but still, it’s a great read. It actually reads a bit like a historical novel….about superstrings!

	Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling Author: Barbara Holland Rating:
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The medieval justice of trial by combat evolved into the private duel by sword and pistol, with thousands of honorable men-and not-so-honorable women-giving lives and limbs to wipe out an insult or prove a point. The duel was essential to private, public, and political life, and those who followed the elaborate codes of procedure were seldom prosecuted and rarely convicted-for, in fact, they were obeying a grand old tradition. Based on her fascinating 1997 Smithsonian article, Barbara Holland’s Gentlemen’s Blood is the first trade book to trace the remarkable, often gruesome, sometimes comical history of the Western tradition of defending one’s honor.

A mildly interesting, completely forgettable read. Very light and still a good bit longer than it needed to be.

	How the Mind Works Author: Steven Pinker Rating:
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In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, “No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him.” The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting.

This is a fantastic book about cognitive and evolutionary psychology. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these fields. It provides a great introduction to a large number of topics and an excellent set of references for further reading. At almost 600 pages it’s a fairly substantial undertaking, but well worth sticking with!