How to write a book review, a general guide:

You dont have to follow the following guide but it may help you to
get started:
1. State the book name and author name in your review
2. Give brief summary of what the book is about (without giving much
away)
3. Highlight the points you enjoyed from the book and why (use
quotes where necessary)
4. Highlight the points you didnt enjoy very much from the book and
why (use quotes where necessary)
5. Any other general comments about the writing style, or interesting
points from the book
6. Some interesting facts about the author may give more depth to
your review
7. Would you recommend the book? If so, why? If not, why not?

Example Book Review

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh : review
Thomas Jones (the guardian Thu 24 October 2013)

The Simpsons, Simon Singh says, is "arguably the most successful television

show in history". It may also be the most allusive: it sometimes seems as if

every aspect of the show is a knowing reference to something else. And
sometimes it seems as if everything else is an unknowing reference to The
Simpsons. The first time I saw Tully Marshall's performance as the sinister
head of Nitro Chemical in the 1942 film noir This Gun for Hire, my immediate
reaction was: "It's Mr Burns!" A similar thought occurred to me watching
Rupert Murdoch testify to the Leveson inquiry. Given the depth, or at least the breadth, of
allusion in the show, and its long-running appeal (it has been on air since 1989), it's little wonder
that there have been so many books along the lines of The Simpsons and Philosophy, The
Psychology of the Simpsons etc.
But "the truth", according to Singh, "is that many of the writers of The Simpsons are deeply in
love with numbers, and their ultimate desire is to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the
subconscious minds of viewers". "Ultimate desire" may be pushing it, but as Singh demonstrates
in his lively book, there's no shortage of mathematical jokes and references scattered through
the show. Whether or not the writers of The Simpsons are covertly using a cartoon to foist
mathematical concepts on the unwary, Singh without question is.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets is a readable and unthreatening introduction to
various mathematical concepts, including , e, infinity, prime numbers, probability, topology,
Fermat's last theorem (the subject of Singh's first book), cryptography (the subject of his
second) and "Ramanujan numbers", otherwise known as "taxicab numbers". The latter are
expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. They're very rare; the smallest is
1729 (13+123 and 93+103), and it crops up a lot in Futurama, the science fiction cartoon created
in 1995 by some of the minds behind The Simpsons. It was also the number of a taxi taken by
the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy when he went to visit his younger colleague Srinivasa
Ramanujan in a Putney nursing home just after the end of the first world war.

Singh's book is full of such anecdotes. Some of the slightly tougher maths meanwhile is
relegated to appendices, such as the one on "fractals and fractional dimensions". Fractals are
"patterns that consist of self-similar patterns at every scale. In other words, the overall
pattern associated with an object persists as we zoom in and out". Even those of us who find it
all a bit confusing can enjoy this excellent joke about "the father of fractals": Q: What does
the B stand for in Benot B Mandelbrot? A: Benot B Mandelbrot.
Alongside the potted biographies of great mathematicians are potted biographies of the more
mathematically minded Simpsons scriptwriters. They all follow more or less the same pattern:
captain of the high-school maths team, an undergraduate degree in maths or physics from

Harvard and a postgraduate degree in maths or computer science from Harvard, Berkeley or
Princeton before being lured away by Hollywood.
There are occasional, not always happy forays into other disciplines, such as sociology. In 2005
Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, made some ill-advised remarks about the reasons
there were fewer women than men in university science and engineering departments,
suggesting that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" were merely "reinforced by what are in fact
lesser factors involving socialisation and continuing discrimination". The Simpsons responded in
an episode called "Girls Just Want to Have Sums", broadcast in 2006. Principal Skinner makes
some unguarded observations about girls being less good than boys at maths; there's an outcry;
a female maths teacher comes in to teach the girls ("how do numbers make you feel?"); Lisa
can't stand it and pretends to be a boy so she can learn some real maths; she comes top of the
class. Bart says: "The only reason Lisa won is because she learned to think like a boy; I turned
her into a burping, farting, bullying math machine." Lisa says: "I did get better at math, but it
was only by abandoning everything I believed in. I guess the real reason we don't see many
women in math and science is " But then she's interrupted by a boy playing the flute. The
writers told Singh "they did not want to deliver a simplistic or glib conclusion", or find
themselves in "Skinner-like trouble". But the story is pretty cringeworthy all the same. Singh
says only that "the writers sneakily sidestepped having to confront this controversial issue";
but he then goes on to quote Carl Friedrich Gauss, writing to Sophie Germain in 1806 after
discovering that she was not, in fact, Monsieur LeBlanc. Gauss observed that a woman,
"according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men
to familiarise herself with these thorny researches".
It isn't always clear who The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets is aimed at. There are
five "examinations" at intervals through the book. Each consists of a series of mathematical
jokes; if you get the joke, you score the points. I passed the "elementary", "high school" and
"university senior" tests with flying colours, scraped through the "masters degree" and abjectly
failed the "PhD"  though the titles of the tests must be meant to flatter the reader, since I
gave up maths halfway through the sixth form. Anyone who needs the joke "We all know 'r2',
but today 'pie are justice'" spelled out to them  "These jokes rely on the fact that 'pie' and ''
are homophones, which lends itself to punnery"  will have given up long before page 19.

Some of the jokes are left unexplained, however. In "Gone Maggie Gone" (2009) Homer has to
transport his baby (Maggie), his dog and a bottle of poison pills across a river in a boat that's
only strong enough to take one of them (along with Homer) at a time. The problem is that he
can't leave the dog alone with the baby in case it bites her, or Maggie alone with the poison pills
unless she eats one. It's a variation on a familiar puzzle, dating back at least to the 8th
century, when Alcuin of York wrote it down. The first thing he has to do is take Maggie across.
But as he's going back for either the dog or the pills, the baby is kidnapped by nuns. Singh
doesn't explain the joke because it doesn't need explaining. But also because it undermines the
conjecture his book is based on. Life, as Singh knows, isn't reducible to mathematics; and nor is
The Simpsons.