Book reviews: Seven Days In The Art World | The Snowball | The Age Of Wonder | Txting

Published on Friday 6 November 2009 18:16

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton (Granta, £8.99)

WHAT a treat. An astute writer haunts the art world and reports it in great detail – the artists and the bullshitters, the millionaires, the hangers-on. You learn a lot. For instance: an auctioneer can spot a bidder before their hand goes up; and red paintings sell better than brown ones; buyers like paintings that are neither too big, nor too small; Nicholas Serota sets his watch ten minutes fast. The action happens before the recession – but there's a handy afterword, too.

The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

(Bloomsbury, 10.99)

THIS 700-page brick of a book tells the life story of Warren Buffett, possibly the best maker of money in history. Born in 1930, he grew up in Depression-era Nebraska. He had two beautiful sisters but was shy and awkward himself. As a boy, he was fixated by the idea that, given time, money snowballs. Then he made tens of billions of dollars. His secret? He studied the stock market, all day, every day. So when he invested, he knew what he was doing. Simple.

The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

(Harper, 9.99)

RICHARD Holmes looks at British scientists a couple of centuries ago, when people sought knowledge for its own sake. There's the young Joseph Banks, possibly the most romantic botanist ever, who went to Tahiti with Captain Cook and became deeply involved with the Pacific islanders. And there's William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, Humphry Davy, the inventor who was also a poet, and some fine stuff about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Txting

by David Crystal

(Oxford, 6.99)

TEXTING, as David Crystal points out, is huge. We'd hardly heard of it a decade ago; now we do it tens of billions of times a year. "So if it is causing problems, we need to know how to manage them," says Crystal. But why should it be causing problems? There's nothing new about using acronyms (think of Nato and BBC). And what about those common abbreviations we use, such as Mr and Mrs? We've been at it for centuries. So calm down.