A very good book, and a surprising one too. I'd expected that Rovelli would write well about physics, but these essays reveal an uncommon depth and breadth of knowledge. Topics include religion, atheism, complexity, statistics, psychedelics, ideology, and philosophy.

It doesn't feel like Rovelli arrogantly assumed that as an expert in one topic, he was qualified to write about all the others he touches on in the book (as books like this sometimes feel). As an aside, if you enjoy writers that get billed as "big thinkers" like Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell, then I think you'll like Rovelli, but I'd especially recommend him to people who don't like those writers for being overly pretentious or conservative. Rovelli does it better. It may be, more than his own insights, Rovelli's ability to clearly explain a concept or flesh out what's important about a topic that makes this book so worth reading.

The essays are all very short (and generally make for quick reading), but there's an incredible amount of nuance packed into them for that brevity. The one area where this seemed to handicap the material was in its tone. As much as many of the essays hit just the right mark, there are some that feel less precise. For example, there is an exoticism in two later essays about Africa which isn't well addressed by Rovelli simply pointing out that he may be indulging "a kind of naïve romanticism". Maybe if he had the liberty of a few more pages he would've been a little more deliberate (Rovelli seems aware, after all, of the biases of his European perspective) and maybe the awkward tone was introduced in the translation of his original essays, but it still leaves something wanting.

The book won't be to everyone's taste, but it is a (mostly) unpretentious and deeply compelling collection of ideas and concepts that would encourage anyone to examine their own preconceptions about how the universe and human society function.