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The Wavewatcher's Companion (2010)

by Gavin Pretor-Pinney(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0747589763 (ISBN13: 9780747589761)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

review 1: Written for people who are afraid of non-fiction. I had to give up after about two chapters. Imagine yourself listening to a friend's uncle rambling about what waves mean to him personally, after you mistakenly let said friend borrow your vehicle to run an entire afternoon's worth of errands. It's not that Uncle Gavin doesn't have some interesting information to share, it's that you'll have to filter-feed on this conversation for several hours to receive anything that could be called a morsel of mental sustenance. If you're looking for conversation and the occasional factoid, Uncle Gavin's your man. If plentiful, well-labeled graphs accompanied by algebraic representations give you the same sensation a six-year-old gets when he hears an ice cream truck, keep loo... moreking.
review 2: I loved Pretor-Pinney's "The Cloudspotter's Guide," and this Companion is another tour-de-force in popular science writing. Pretor-Pinney's natural charm and wit show through in his writing, which is well-researched and easy to understand. This book is much more ambitious than the Cloudspotter's Guide, since wave phenomena are present in many more scientific areas than clouds, which are mostly limited to meteorology. However, the format of part-science book, part-travel narrative is the same as the Guide, and it works reasonably well here.His book builds on itself, from the very basic ocean waves to part-particle-part-wave photons, but it occasionally lost me in the minutiae of certain aspects of waves. I feel that he also could have chosen his examples better, although all were interesting. less

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