Jack

An excellent guide through the history of British council and social housing. While the focus is largely on London it does a good job to touch on the key themes and challenges taking place, including themes from Europe. I agree with a lot of the points made by the author though did find the tendency to decry conservative policy and push his own left wing ideologies a bit grating. This is not to say the book doesn't offer factual balance and state the benefits and successes of such policies but a ‘yearning' for the ways of old is consistently returned to, as an opinion I have no issue with this but I feel it tends to sideline some of the needed budgetary transformations of local government it has already outlined as critical and of importance.
The research and summarisation is overall excellent, I particularly enjoyed the final chapter which was written in a much more prosaic style and drew conclusions and weighed up the current and future situation wonderfully.
If I could I'd have given it 4.5 stars.

A little late to the party here but it still holds up. A very strong start and interesting insight into early human and societal developments which unfortunately wanes in the final chapters as the target shifts to the present and future. While the conjecture of historical evidence provided interesting insight and opinion I found this to be slightly overbearing to the actual points being made.
Overall still a strong recommendation, “If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going.”

While I did find the overall message and studies (though interesting) to get very repetitive towards the end of the book I would still recommend this to anyone interested in the link between specialism, growth and curiosity. A lot of the examples are framed in scientific or research based environments but even so it paints a clear image of how breadth of interest can have an impact.

I really enjoyed this book.

Tim Marshall does not attempt to analyse the given scenarios in too much depth but does paint a strong socio-political-historically-geographic background for each of the world maps he investigates. The geography aspect does get a little repetitive but I feel this book has so much information to supply from all of the above four areas of study that there was something interesting and new on almost every page.
Sensibly, the author has avoided offering solutions beyond explaining the situations how they arise and what persists them. But I feel he also fails to address some bigger issues that are landed on again and again such as climate change, with fossil fuel extraction and trade playing a major role throughout but more as a technical footnote than as altering forces. This may have again been a smart choice however to remove political opinion and bias from what is largely a factual book.
That said the approach taken is clearly from the western point of view, though there is an effort made to explain national ideas and goals through the eyes of the subjects.

Overall I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a general interest in our planet, it's geography, the nations of the world, politics, history or economics as this book is an eye opener and really pieces together the vast aspects of the globalised world.

It took a while for me to warm up to this book. The writing style is fun and inclusive but I felt like I was getting ghosted when it came to any hard maths with things being teased but ultimately left unknown. I know realistically most proofs are absolutely meaningless to most readers but I felt like I was being short-changed. However, I found as I got further in and the chapters were able to reference each other and the previous content many loose ends started to get tied off nicely and build what ended up being a completeness to the topics covered.
Obviously it's not exhaustive or massively comprehensive in its covering of this subject but I think the book and the author do a great job of making abstract topics not only accessible to readers, but also kind of fun. It's certainly an interesting read with a lot of new ideas and concepts for me, and a extended my knowledge of things I thought I was familiar with.
Overall I think the book achieves its goal of making obscure mathematics enjoyable and absorbing.