Not a Good Book for Audio

I'll start by saying I'm a big fan of Melanie Mitchell. I listened to her book on artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and loved it. When I saw that her 2009 book on complexity was coming out on audio, I couldn't wait to listen to it b/c it's a topic I'm fascinated by. I've read or listened to about 10 books on the topic, including Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (a fabulous book), Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science (another great book which I recently reread after first reading it and not fully understanding it when it first came out in 1987), Geoffrey West's Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, and several others.

So, I thought Melanie Mitchell's Complexity book would be perfect b/c she did an amazing job w/her highly sophisticated primer on AI without dumbing it down and she has a deep background in complexity science through her years at Santa Fe Institute (the epicenter of complexity science). Unfortunately, her Complexity is not a great book for LISTENING b/c it's loaded w/numbers and formulas which are really difficult to process (for me at least) in audio format. I returned the book after listening for 3hrs (thanks Audible) b/c it didn't appear that numeric and formula references/reading were going to change.

Complexity is a field rich w/formulas, constants, and other variables. Some lend themselves well to explanation (eg, power laws) but others require a dive into the formulas.

I'm giving it 4 stars b/c in written format, it's probably wonderful and it's unfair to ding Ms MItchell for writing a great book that doesn't do wonderfully in audio format.

If you're not familiar with Complexity, I'd highly recommend starting with Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. The book not only explains how complexity science came about and the cross discipline scientists (eg, physicists, biologists, economists, meteorologists...) who were involved in its creation but also what it is and why understanding complexity science is so relevant today.

7 people found this helpful

It was very interesting

I really liked the book a lot. It was very informative and easy to understand.

Interesting but not appropriate for an audiobook

I gave up half way through. Although the material is often fascinating, the math and computer code, although not complicated, can't be adequately understood as the audio flows by. As others have noted, this is not suited to the audiobook format. I would consider reading a text version.