Book Reviews

List of Reviews

During my career as an astrophysicist, I have developed a fondness for many books. I would like to share with my reader the books that I find the most useful or the most enjoyable to read. While I have broad tastes in books, I shall confine myself in these pages to nonfiction books in astronomy, astrophysics, philosophy of science, and history of science, with some selected books on the Java computer language and on numerical analysis.

While Amazon's rating system is an invaluable tool for assessing the quality of a book, it is unable to distinguish between quality books in astrophysics and quality books in UFO lore. One can find numerous four and five star books that discuss as fact the most peculiar ideas about the planets and the stars. I hope in my recommendations to add some editorial content to these ratings so that you may judge not only whether other readers enjoyed a book, but also whether the information in the book is sound and written at a level that you feel comfortable with.