Random reading

I polished off a couple of paperbacks in a batch Princeton University Press kindly sent me for doing some reviewing: Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz, and Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales by John Tyler Bonner. The latter was more my cup of tea – the former is more about spirituality than about reading and writing, and the author’s journey out of academia to a religious community and back again. Why Size Matters (first published in 2006 although this paperback is new) is very similar to Geoffrey West’s (2018) Scale, although shorter and focused on biology and ecology rather than society at large – although it does note the link in Adam Smith between the division of labour and the size of the market.

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