Book Reviews : Why Arches Fall--and Other Mysteries

Rainbows, Curveballs and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained by Ira Flatow (William Morrow: $15.95; 271 pages; illustrated)

Sometimes when journalists write books, what they really have written is a bunch of articles that get bound together between hard covers. Such a product is a book only in name and shape.

A real book needs a central point, a theme, a message. Whatever that idea is, each of the book’s chapters should advance it. Ira Flatow is a very good science journalist whose work has graced National Public Radio and public television. But in “Rainbows, Curveballs and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained,” he has not succeeded in writing a book. He has instead written a series of individual articles that might be subtitled “The Science of Everyday Things,” which could be the scripts for his PBS series “Newton’s Apple.”

As these things go, the articles are fine. Perfect reading for a precocious junior high school student with unbounded wonder about what makes the sky blue, why rainbows are always curved, why men grow bald but women don’t, what accounts for the “sweet spots” on a tennis racket, how sailboats work, what accounts for hurricanes and a million other things (or so it seems).

If all this sounds like something you’d like to know about, Flatow’s book has much to recommend it. He writes in a clear, precise style with a touch of humor here and there, and his explanations are very good. All readers are bound to learn something they didn’t know.

But I, for one, ask more of a book. I want the author to wrestle with some larger idea. I’m not satisfied with a lot of facts, however interesting they are. Piling up facts should not be an end in itself.