| The Wavewatcher's Companion | |
| Author: | Gavin Pretor-Pinney |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Science books |
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury |
| Pub Date: | 2010 |
| Media Type: | |
| Pages: | 336 pp |
| Isbn: | 978-0-7475-8976-1 |
The Wavewatcher's Companion is a 2010 science book by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.
The book was the 2011 winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
The book is a wide-ranging discussion on waves in all their forms and how waves are such an intimate part of our lives.
The book's topics include:
As Jennifer Ouellette of the Wall Street Journal describes, Pretor-Pinney 'employs a chatty, conversational tone, with clear technical explanations enlivened by real-world examples, whimsical asides, personal anecdotes and inventive analogies' to explain his subject.[1]
The book was well received on its publication. Victoria Segal of The Guardian enthused that Pretor-Pinney "has the gifted teacher's knack for finding the right metaphor to hook the attention".[2] Toby Clements of the Daily Telegraph felt it was a worthy sequel to Pretor-Pinney's previous surprise best-seller, 'The Cloudspotter's Guide.[3]
The book was the 2011 winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books,[4] the prestigious award for science writing.Richard Holmes, the Chair of judging panel, said it was a 'highly unusual and outstandingly effective piece of popular science writing and that Pretor-Pinney "had managed to use relatively straight-forward science to transform the readers' perspective of the world around them".[5] Richard Holmes noted the importance of the award stating “Popular science is an increasingly important genre, and this is an increasingly important prize".[4]