The canon : a whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science

I found the tone of this book pretentious. Angier begins by decrying the average American's state of scientific ignorance, but the subtext seems to be, "And look at me and how clever I am!" The apparent goal of the book is to provide a well-written, basic introduction to science for the intelligent layperson. Angier tries and fails to keep the narrative witty and sophisticated by larding the text with too many poetic devices (alliteration, rhyming, etc.) and by attempting frequent rimshot jokes based on pop-culture references. Almost every page has a statement that could be put into the New Yorker magazine's "Block that metaphor!" section.

  Now, I know that some people enjoyed this book, but, unless you enjoy reading in nearly every sentence something like Angier's reference to a school bus being "a cheery chariot of children," you will quickly tire of it. Perhaps this book is the author's outlet for all of the rhetorical filigree that the New York Times' editors strike from her workaday science articles. The book's cover is honest: it shows fibers curved into elaborate curlicues, and that is just how the prose reads. What is worse: some of her metaphors suggest qualities to an entity that it doesn't have. These strained metaphors might easily confuse readers who are not already familiar with scientific prinicples, i.e. the intended audience.

  That having been said, if one trudges on past the first part of the book, where the book justifies its existence due to the reader's ignorance, Angier does discuss some interesting topics. Her definition of science is a bit narrow, but it is not too unreasonable. The topics on which she focuses often have a relevance to the average person. For example, she explores how people will make costly errors by thinking of statistical situations with bad mental models. In physics, she explains that even Harvard grads with science majors will naively offer Aristotelian explanations for simple mechanical phemonema.

  Perhaps the best two sections IMHO are the one on chemistry and the one on the living cell. I felt that those topics were complicated enough so as to prevent her from devoting her energies to witticisms. The section on evolution was not persuasive, and a creationist reading it would have simply been confirmed in the opinion that supporters of Darwinism are arrogant. The best current defense for and explanation of evolution is Richard Dawkin's "The Greatest Show on Earth." The section on geology toward the end of Angier's book is just as bad as the bad sections earlier in the text, so it is not a case of the writer improving as the book grew toward completion.

  One reviewer on Amazon suggested that a different book succeeds at what this book attempts: Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I agree entirely with that assessment. I enjoyed Bryson a great deal. Instead of trying to dazzle the reader with too many over-wrought literary devices, he finds humorous stories about scientific pioneers to keep the reader engaged. One also gets from his book a sense of the sublime grandeur of the universe, a sense that I did not get from this book.

  I listened to the audio version of this book, and the tone of the reader conveyed perfectly the smug tone of the writing.

Overall, this is a good layman's introduction to the major concepts of the primary sciences - physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. The book has a bibliography for further reading and the author's passion for her subject is obvious.

The main weakness of the book is the overabundance of wit. Puns, cultural references and other humorous statements abound. It starts out well, but after the first chapter wears thin. Still worth reading though.