David F. Hutchings

This book is rather small and does not look like much, but reading it was very interesting. It does not only retell the night of the Titanic's sinking, but starts much earlier with the history of the White Star Line, the development of the ocean liner industry in general, and the construction and first voyages of the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship. Of course, since the book is short, all of this is presented in a concise manner, but it still manages to pack a lot of background. Sometimes the style is a little wordy and the sentences seem too complex for what they really say, but apart from that, the text is very readable although it contains so much information in such a small space.
The story continues with the building of the Titanic, her launch and voyage to Cherbourg and Cóbh (Queenstown), her days at sea, the sinking and the aftermath. There is information about some of the passengers, the technical details, the interior in the different classes etc.
The book contains a lot of pictures, and these really fascinated me because there were many that I had never seen before, a lot of them from the author's own collection. Some of those pictures actually gave me goosebumps because I felt like getting closer to the Titanic than ever before.
I am happy that I finally read this book and I learned many new aspects, although it would have been worth it for the pictures alone.… (altro)

A book about physics and cosmology without equations? Yes!

It's a remarkably easy read showing the main advances in cosmology that Stephen Hawking made during his enormously significant career -- including on Big Bang, black holes, Hawking Radiation, and the nature of time itself.

The last part shows that Hawking is not the first physicist to get deeply embedded in metaphysics and philosophy, despite declaring philosophy "dead". This is where he founders, being blind to the limits of physics, and the irreducible theoretical problems with invoking multiverses and dismissing notions of God.… (altro)