By far the most accessible of Smil's books that I've read. That might be why I thought it was his worst.

I enjoy his work very much. Most of his books teach me things I didn't know before.

There are a few interesting numerical facts in this one, but the lessons on scale, probability distributions and so on were familiar. ( )

I just reviewed a terrific book by Vaclav Smil a couple of months ago, and now here is already another. Prodigious doesn’t begin to describe this author and academic. There are nearly 50 titles listed in the Also By. All of his books that I have reviewed have been fascinating. Until this one, Size. This one is a crazy quilt of trivia and topline findings on anything even remotely to do with sizes. And if size is not an issue, Smil finds a way to make it one. This is not the Vaclav Smil we have come to appreciate and love.

He wanders from the astronomical (the known universe so far is 93 billion light-years across and each light-year itself is about six trillion miles) to the submicroscopic atomic (a difference of 35 orders of magnitude from the universe), and settles in on mammals. There’s lots to examine in Man, including overall size, length of limbs, size of skull, height, BMI, heart functions, sight, and so on. It becomes a festival of little known facts, and the people who determined them.

In his usual thoroughly numbers-based way, he makes endless points about endless things. Of cars, he points out that SUVs produce 25% more emissions than sedans at a time when environmental consciousness would normally have focused on more efficiency, not less.

Size differences impress him. He loves comparing the smallest to the largest: the smallest engine, producing five watts, is the model airplane motor Tee-Dee. The largest is the Wartsila Marine Diesel, producing 84 megawatts. It’s a kind of randomized Guinness Book of Records for the first hundred pages.

But soon, Smil starts applying the concept of scale. By enlarging something, will it perform better, consume more, or even be feasible? Some things scale in a linear fashion; if you double the size, it will be doubly powerful, and/or consume double the fuel. Motors are like that. Some things are less than linear, and give back less than simply having two of them would. All very reasonable, but still left me wondering what the book was about.

In terms of profundity, Smil still says some very Smil-like things (thankfully): “Modern civilization will not be able to design its way out of its many predicaments.” Cities cannot simply get more and more crowded. Greater Tokyo, at 40 million people, is as populous as Canada, the second largest country in the world. That sort of thing.

It is interesting, but less so as it goes on. Screen sizes range from four cm (an Apple watch) to 150 meters (a Jumbotron). Or this: “More than a billion people (the global count of all road vehicles is now approaching 1.5 billion) are now individually commanding machines whose unit power is commonly an order of magnitude higher than the power of the largest mid-19th-century industrial waterwheel designs used in large flour mills and textile factories.” What to do with that data?

Everything is getting bigger, from cars to ships, from homes to office towers. People want bigger, including their own bodies. This leads to how to calculate your own BMI, and how obesity besets people in various societies.

He analyzes just how big things can possibly be. Steel lets us build taller buildings than wood does, for example. But traveling up the world’s tallest buildings is a commute itself. How much of that can we take? This leads to two chapters on of all things Gulliver’s Travels. Smil criticizes Swift for his math. Reading Swift without a calculator will let gullible readers believe what he says about tiny Lilliputians and gigantic Brobdinagians. They’re impossible, Smil says. He says the Lilliputians needn’t have worried about feeding the gigantic Gulliver, because food requirements aren’t linear with size. Lilliputians eat more per gram of body mass than Gulliver would.

He also shows that Lilliputians could not exist at all, because things like lungs and hearts can’t simply scale down and operate at the same efficiencies as man-size. Cell size would not change, for instance. A Lilliputian brain in such a tiny skull would not permit the bearer to act as a human. Brobdinagians would have to have bones like no other beings on earth to support their weight vertically. They would not be able to move, much less thrive at the heights Swift cites (65-70 feet tall). Their hearts would be impossible. Their brains, in skulls that gigantic, … well, you get the idea.

I just kept thinking, this is fiction, a fairytale. Why are you bothering to assassinate a 300 year old fairytale? Over two chapters of this slim book?

But then the book turned really sour for me. Smil decides to devote the last quarter of the book to the Statisticians Hall of Fame. He is all over his heroes from, France, Germany and his native Czechoslovakia who founded or developed major portions of Statistics. There is a segment on how to calculate a standard deviation that I could have lived without. There’s an ode to the beauty of normal distribution, how it got its name, and how many places it can be applied, mostly accurately. How largely predictable patterns in the natural world give comfort to statisticians. Inverse power law gets its own section, too. It actually became a hard slog, uniquely in my experience with the books of Vaclav Smil.

He lost my interest to the point of me thinking, how is he going to tie all this together? Because so far, it was life, the universe and everything. When I finally got to the Conclusions (yes, plural. He has FOUR of them: a thousand words, a hundred words, ten words and one word), my worst fears were realized: “Anybody expecting a grand synthesis culminating in a small number of conclusions imparting concentrated wisdom about size will be disappointed.”

Well to Smil’s credit, that was another prediction that came true.

David Wineberg ( )