Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, by Kip Thorne: 5/5 stars.
Unfortunately, my reading is often influenced by which books are immediately at hand. About halfway through Black Holes and Time Warps, the toddler carried it off and I was stuck with my husband's selection from the book box: Murray Rothbard's Education, Free and Compulsory. He picked it because it was the shortest book in the box. I am not sure my husband understands the point of reading.
I suppose I should explain how this book got into my book box in the first place: Amazon tricked me. It saw all of the homeschooling books I've read and the occasional economics book, and decided I would like something by an economist on education. The book was cheap and had good reviews (damn review inflation,) so while I was spending my birthday bookmoney, I decided to toss it in. The book arrived and immediately my husband and I were all "Eww Rothbard eww Austrian School eww libertarian capitalism eww." But I'd paid for it and I had it, so sooner or later it was going to get read.
At least it wasn't Academia and the Luster of Capital.
Education, Free and Compulsory is Rothbard's little (and I do mean little; it's only about 55 pages long) diatribe against the public school system. There are about 5-10 interesting pages in the middle about the history of the public school system, (apparently Martin Luther was the first successful advocate of coercive public schools in Europe,) a few points of minor offensiveness, and the rest of the book is mostly meh. But in the conclusion Rothbard runs completely off-tack, forgets the entire argument he's been building throughout the book about coercion, and jumps straight into the 12 foot section of the pool without first learning to swim. Rothbard appears to have honestly never set foot in a public school classroom, much less have a good idea of what goes on in public schools, and he switches from condemning compulsion to complaining about teaching methodologies he personally happens to dislike.
Thankfully it's a short book. Unfortunately, it has almost nothing to offer. If you want to see why coercion is bad, go read Kohn's Punished by Rewards. If you want a diatribe about why the school system sucks or how mass schooling fails the individual, try Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction or Wallace's Better than School. And if you want a history of the American public school system from an opponent's perspective, I guarantee that Gatto's The Underground History of American Education will be better, based simply on Gatto's other works I've read.
Thankfully, I did recover and get to finish Black Holes and Time Warps relatively quickly. The book is marvelous. I rate it up there with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, though they have obviously very different subject matter.
I have a sort of history with this book--I found it in the library when I was 12 years old and carried it around with me for the next month, trying my best to understand the physics which fills the first couple of chapters. It actually gets much easier after the first couple hundred pages, but I never got much past 150 before the library wanted the book back and schoolwork ended up taking precedence. I ended up spending much of my 'reading' time on class assignments aimed at children--what a bloody waste.
But the book stayed with me, percolating in the back of my mind, always a reminder of how beautiful and interesting the universe could be, if I could only escape the things I was supposed to learn at my age and enter the world of adult science.
Many years later, inspired by my enjoyment of Herbert's Quantum Reality, which my husband had picked out because he was interested in part of it, and Gilder's The Age of Entanglement, I decided to hunt down my old favorite book from sixth grade and give it another go.
Reading the book was like embarking on a personal journey of self-revelation. Obviously this is not going to be everyone's reaction to a popular physics book, but for me, rediscovering the origins of ideas which have been floating around in my brain for a decade and a half, the origins of many of my intellectual ideas and ways I fundamentally think of the deep structure of the universe, was quite revealing. I think that if I had finished this book at the time or had proper support in place to encourage my interest in science, I'd have turned out a different person--I might have even been so lucky as to avoid majoring in political science.
I don't mean to say that my education was inadequate or my parents not supportive of my interests--but the mainstream educational system cannot handle a sixth grader with an interest in relativity or quantum, and my parents at the time were not homeschooling me. Like most parents, they regarded my interests with amusement, but that was abut it--my mother recently confessed that she'd never actually believed that I was reading the book back in the day; she thought I was carrying it around just to look smart. (As though I had such pretensions as to try to "look" anything--actually, I wanted to look Mexican, but that's an entirely different subject.)
Anyway, the book itself is wonderful. If you or a kid you know are interested in physics and aren't already knowledgeable about black holes, I highly recommend it. Thorne's style is readable and fairly accessible to the lay reader, filling the book with page after page of astounding, fascinating information, including a good look at the history of black hole and cosmological research, covering such notable personalities as Einstein, (of course,) Oppenheimer, Teller, Landau, Hawking, and more.
I should specify that this is not a book about all of relativity or modern physics in general. It won't teach you about quantum physics (in fact, from my reading of quantum, Thorne's description of the quantum uncertainty principle is incorrect--my only quibble with the book--but this point does not impact the overall work.) This book is only about black hole research, with a speculative chapter at the end about time warps. But if that's what you're after, it's a fabulous book.
Next up: The Essential Montessori (preliminarily 3 stars,) and People of the Book (fiction).