Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had hopes for the book based on all of the reviews - my wife started out with it and got to page 21 before handing it to me. "seems like it's a little padded" she said. I got to page 29 before I too came to the conclusion that Holt seemed to be working from an impressive collection of other people's quotes to bolster his thesis. His reading list is obviously incredibly broad and deep. But in the first twelve pages, citations were made for the opinions, thoughts, etc of something like 26 different people. This is in 12 pages. Then I started to wonder what his thesis is. There was just too much clutter of other people's musings to keep it on track for me. Getting to the anecdotes on nothing, I realized that this truly was going nowhere. I skipped ahead to see if any traction was coming up. Nope, Saint Anselm, Bertrand Russell. Up to Leslie's axiarchism, past Updike, finally I just gave up. Look, I think the subject is wonderful. It is addressed in so many places: Timothy Ferris, Hawking, Hegel, Kant, Martin Rees' "Just Six Numbers", Zen Flesh/Zen Bones, John Barrow's "Constants of Nature", even (gag) Sartre. on and on. A lot of these books are in the realm of 'popular science' and one might have to skip over a few of the equations or get the philosophers in the, for example, "Sartre (gag) for Dummies" edition. But Holt shouldn't be rewarded for having the biggest rolodex of quotations on the planet and stuffing them in a book and having you think he's pretty smart. He could have said all of this in about 50 pages. To quote Martin Rees on the subject, "The fundamental question of 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'remains the province of philosophers. And even they may be wiser to respond, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, that 'whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent'". (Just six numbers, page 145)