Books of the month — December 2022
Four books, briefly reviewed: Johan Anderberg's The Herd, Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy, Amalia Bautista's poetry, and Stillwell on geometry.
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The Herd. Johan Anderberg. A good book on how Sweden approached the management of the pandemic differently from other countries. It gathers a great deal of material and raises interesting questions about how Sweden might have been used as the control group, from the perspective of randomised clinical trials.
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The Age of Empathy. Frans de Waal. A book that reads very well if evolutionary biology and psychology are your thing. Full of references to field studies and experiments, it offers a good reflection on the role of empathy in a comparison between animal and human societies.
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Tres deseos. Poesía reunida. Amalia Bautista. I discovered Amalia through a poem that drifted past me on social media, and I enjoyed this distillation of her poetry like a child. Marvellous.
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The Four Pillars of Geometry. John Stillwell. Excellent, like all of Stillwell's books. Here you walk through many classical mathematical proofs starting from the compass, and in that learning by doing you grasp the power of the trivial, the circle, and how from a handful of first elements you can end up drawing out a great many consequences.