Scale (Geoffrey West) - Mere Mortals Book Review

This episode of the Mere Mortals book review covers 'Scale: The Universal Laws of Life And Death In Organisms, Cities And Companies' by Geoffrey West. This book promised to deliver so much, but unfortunately fell a little bit short. In it a theoretical physicist turned biologist tries to discover what characteristics of animal, cities and companies are similar independent of size. He manages to show this in some very convincing graphs that occur throughout the book, one of the books actual strong points.

The first three chapters are very solid and draw the attention with some interesting, not well known facts (such as that the average life span of heartbeats for just about every mammal is 1.5 billion). It begins to fade in the middle section of the book as he starts beginning some personal digressions, which while entirely in his right (it's his own damn book), are just not super interesting or written in a style that will make you agree/intrigued.

He ends with his look at cities and companies, which unfortunately gets bogged down and to me felt like he could have shortened these chapters or make them 'pop' more. A decent book but nothing that will ever be known as a classic. 6.5/10.

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