I haven’t been entirely impressed with other This American Life (TAL) collections, but this one is really great all the way through. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Lots of fun. Lots of hilarious fun.

I’ve been listing through the Audiobook version of this when I can. I’ve been really pleased with it.

If you are new to David Sedaris, I really recommend catching an audio version of him. The way he reads his stories really adds something to them. Additionally, I recommend your first experiences with Sedaris be live ones. Hearing the audience respond will help you really get into his stuff.

That is, he has a very dry humor, and if you don’t hear other people laughing, you might be afraid to laugh and end up not enjoying the whole experience.

Check out his live at Carnegie Hall. That’s pretty decent. Then graduate to something like this (which includes live and studio versions of his stuff).

And then eventually I guess you can move onto print work. I’m not there yet, but I have to imagine that in the right mood his work in print would be just as funny as his work read aloud.

So far this has not been that funny. And I’m even listening to the audiobook read by the author—you would think at least THAT would be funny!

It’s alright. Some things make me laugh… but usually it’s just awkward and dull.

Lewis Black keeps talking about how hard it is to write a book. Maybe he should have just slept in the day he decided to write this one.

This book really turned me off of anything authored by George Johnson. He spends a great deal of time at the beginning of the book discussing the difference between the technical writer and the scientist—explaining the role of the technical writer as a bridge between the scientist and the layman, though his explanation makes it sound like the technical writer sits above both of them. It’s as if the world would stop turning if all of the technical writers stopped doing their jobs. The rest of the book is presented as if the reader was stupid, and in some places his condescension makes him so opaque that you start wondering if the author even knows what he’s talking about.

However, this book does cover a number of interesting topics. I just think that there are other books that cover them better. Pick up a good book on cryptography (e.g. The Code Book by Simon Singh) and another one on quantum mechanics (e.g. Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert) and you’ll probably be set. Additionally, you’ll get the same amount of detailed coverage presented from this book from articles in monthly science magazines or on-line in short Wikipedia entries.

This book largely felt like a waste of time.

This book has an interesting goal. It does not mean to discuss quantum mechanics in general but rather its consequences on the nature of reality. He uses this metaphysical goal as a frame for an introductory book on quantum mechanics. Thus, there is nothing necessarily unique about this books content. A seasoned physicist or even physics student will probably be familiar with all of the arguments made in the book. In fact, even the average reader of non-fiction science books about physics, cosmology, and astronomy will be familiar with most of the topics discussed in this book. However, this book touches on those topics with a special detail that many other authors gloss over. This detail shouldn’t scare the layman away; this book can be read without any prior mathematical or scientific knowledge. Herbert manages to capture the essence of detailed procedures (e.g., inner-product projections of quantum mechanical wave functions) by invoking very simple analogies (e.g., prisms that separate the colors of light). He also avoids esoteric terminology when constructing these analogies.

This is really a great book. The reader should expect to get a good introduction to quantum mechanics while also learning about the struggle to understand how strange space and time must be in order to justify our observations of the very small.

This book is definitely appropriate for the interested layman.