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The Bibliphile

These three books provide a unique perspective on the world around us.

Pretty Good House: A Guide to Creating Better Homes, by Michael Maines, Daniel Kolbert, Emily Mottram and Christopher Briley, 252 pages, Taunton Press hardcover, 2022

Whether you’re building your dream house, planning a home renovation, replacing mechanical systems or considering solar panels, this book provides indispensable advice.

Gain the confidence to make sound choices and supervise the work. Think of it as required reading in a course on building science — that’s the term used by the four authors to describe their professions in the 21^st century.

Pretty Good House is well-organized and conversational in tone. It features more than 200 color photos. More than 80 maps, graphs, tables and illustrations explain complex subjects.

The book explains technical terms such WRBs, window U-factors and R-factors. Read advice on how to hire and collaborate with professionals. You’ll finish this book wiser and more confident in making decisions that are costly and difficult to reverse.

The authors are two architects, a contractor and a building designer/renovator. They espouse environmentally friendly, simple structures that are stylish in design and affordable.

Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment, by Grady Hillhouse, 251 pages, No Starch Press hardcover, 2022

You may not live near a dam, port or wind farm, but you surely drive on roads, through tunnels and over bridges. You walk past utility poles and transmission wires.

Are you curious about the cryptic markings and metal tags on utility poles? Did you know some buttons at crosswalks are placebos and don’t hasten green lights for pedestrians?

Engineering in Plain Sight provides a comprehensive and logical explanation of the many types of construction that we encounter in our daily lives.

Lessons about infrastructure are organized into eight chapters. “Keep an eye out” sidebars provide fun facts about 40 subjects such as bridge expansion joints, cofferdams and geostationary satellites. More than 50 full page color illustrations show the components of manmade structures.

Share this book with a grandchild or young protege. Expose them to a career that could take them from playing with LEGOs to graduate studies in engineering.

The Einstein Effect: How the World’s Favorite Genius Got into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds, by Benyamin Cohen, 384 pages, Sourcebooks paperback, 2023

The discoveries of Albert Einstein continue to impact our everyday lives. Explore how devices we have come to rely on, such as GPS, remote control devices and supermarket scanners, are based on his findings.

Author Benyamin Cohen takes readers in hand and explains, with the help of experts he interviews, these concepts: the general theory of relativity, the special theory of relativity, Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and more.

Cohen brings to life aspects of Einstein’s life as a refugee from Nazism, his influence in founding the Hebrew University and his civil rights advocacy.

Today, the International Rescue Committee, which is the successor of an organization he founded, continues his work on behalf of refugees.

While Einstein favored the U.S. development of an atomic bomb to counter Nazi Germany, his subsequent pacifism and objection to the development of the hydrogen bomb are touched upon.

To keep the narrative light, Cohen discusses the world of social media and the celebrity status of Einstein. Cohen manages the social media accounts of Albert Einstein on behalf of the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, which has 20 million followers. A portion of the book’s royalties are donated to the Archives.

Einstein’s legacy lives on in inspiring and encouraging those who, like him, were not branded as stellar students but developed in the shadow of more successful scholars.