Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers, Alexander Zvonkin (Moscow Center for Continuing Mathematical Education, 2007).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).| www.thepsmiths.com
Your regular reviewers are busily tending to the newest Psmithling and will return anon. In the interim, we present a guest review by Thomas Casey. The Wake: A Novel, Paul Kingsnorth (Graywolf Press, 2015). What if the apocalypse had already happened? Your friends and family dead, your home and city reduced to ash, your language erased, your gods forgotten, and your temples reduced to a few blocks of bleached stone scattered across a grassy field. Your world has ended. That is the case for co...| www.thepsmiths.com
Einstein’s Unification, Jeroen van Dongen (Cambridge University Press, 2010).| www.thepsmiths.com
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert (Basic Books, 1980). I go to some effort to teach my kids math at home, to the point that they’re generally a year or two ahead of whatever’s happening at school. Most of my reasons are personal and idiosyncratic: I like math, and it’s fun to share my hobbies with my kids. I also despise the way math is usually taught, and want their first encounter with certain beautiful ideas not to be ruined by a teacher who doesn't ...| www.thepsmiths.com
We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading.| www.thepsmiths.com
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (New York Review of Books, 2021). Have you ever sat and stared at the sea? If you’ve been near it, then I’m sure you have. As soon as it hoves into view, our eyes are drawn ineluctably up to that far horizon, that endless undulating plain. Coast-dwelling cultures around the earth have stories and legends about the ocean’s strange magnetism, like some eldritch vista that once beheld deepens and ages the soul, but stare too long and...| www.thepsmiths.com
The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Cruise of the Nona, Hilaire Belloc (1925; Loreto, 2014). Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailb...| www.thepsmiths.com
