Book tips from the Kennislink editors

December is the month of elaborate Christmas dinners, winter walks in the woods, and Christmas movies. But also an excellent moment to settle down in your favorite chair, with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book. Our editors recommend her favorite books for under the tree.

The Bosatlas of Dutch football

“A Dutchman lives on average 1.6 kilometers from a football field.” The Bosatlas of Dutch football is full of such fascinating facts. No sport plays such a major role in the lives of the Dutch, and the atlas makes that immediately clear with such data. Especially the clear cards in this book stand out, for example with an overview of Saturday and Sunday clubs where you immediately see that especially the Catholic South plays on Sunday.

Much care has also been taken with the photos and graphics. This way you can clearly see where Dutch trainers and players are active abroad (especially England, but also in the Maldives). The information density is high. Each page contains a wealth of information. There is a lot in it that I did not know, such as that a street in Amsterdam is named after Rotterdammer and Sparta legend Bok de Korver. Or that every year 650,000 field football players are injured. This is one of those books you just want to keep flipping through, learning something new from time to time and making it a great Christmas gift.

– Robert Visscher, Technology editor –

Read more about 'The Bosatlas of Dutch football'

Martin and Emma investigate the Dutch dialect landscape

By Martijn Wieling, Lorenzo Milito and Ruggero Montalto

Martijn Wieling of the University of Groningen is researching the tongue movements of dialect speakers. He was able to make a comic strip about his research with a grant from the Young Academy. It is a very short comic, of only 8 pages, but you can download it for free on the Wielings website and you can also choose a Dutch or English version. The discovery that the researchers make in the comic is not earth-shattering, namely that the position of the tongue is different in speakers from Ter Apel and Ubbergen. In fact, you would especially like to read what exactly we have from that outcome. But the comic does give a very good idea of what it means to do scientific research. The comic form also makes it very attractive to read. In short, this comic makes you want more!

– Mathilde Jansen, editor Linguistics –

Download the comic by Martijn Wieling here

Space-time swell

By Govert Schilling

Gravitational waves are hot. Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago that space-time could sway like a kind of cosmic pond. And extreme violent events such as the colliding of two black holes send ripples into space like a pebble in that pond. Einstein himself did not believe that we would ever be able to measure this subtle effect. But nothing is less true. Since the very first detection in 2015, scientists with ultra-sensitive detectors on Earth have "heard" a handful of black holes and extremely massive stars merging. In between these scientific firsts, last October the Nobel Prize in Physics also went to this brand new field of astronomy. If you want to know how a hundred-year scientific journey ultimately led to these spectacular discoveries, you should read Deining in spacetime by science journalist Govert Schilling. An enlightening and entertaining book full of anecdotes, travel reports, facts and good analogies. Excellent for under the Christmas tree.

Read the review of 'Swell in spacetime' on NEMO Kennislink here.

– Roel van der Heijden, editor Astronomy, Physics &Technology –

Women in the life of Piet Mondrian

By Katjuscha Otte &Ingelies Vermeulen

Last year was the year of the Style. A nice end to the (Style) year is therefore a book about Mondriaan, one of the style icons of this movement. Although everything has been written about the painter to some extent, the authors nevertheless managed to find an original angle:Women in the life of Piet Mondriaan. Friends and models as well as rich admirers who promoted and traded Mondrian's works of art are reviewed. This gives the reader a new image of the artist, who actually plays a supporting role in the book. The women, and especially their influence on Mondrian and his career, are more important.

Mondriaan's relationship with these women is characteristic of this, influenced by his strict Christian upbringing. The artist loves female company but sees them as pure beings and is afraid of intimacy. The man would nowadays be labeled 'commitment fear', so his pattern of attraction and repulsion is visible. He also glorified young women all his life. When Mondrian is finally ready to get married in his old age, the father of the bride-to-be doesn't like it. His daughter just finished a teenager. Quite tragic, but nice to read how former loves often become dear friends. They are ready for Mondrian and will continue to take care of him when he is having a hard time.

– Marjolein Overmeer, editor Humanities –

Read more about 'Women in the life of Piet Mondrian'

Lingua – Across Europe in 69 languages

By Gaston Dorren

A few centuries ago, the French borrowed the word 'mannequin' from the Dutch 'manneken'. Dutch then took this word back from French. This book by Gaston Dorren made a similar enriching tour – in a much shorter time frame, admittedly. Language Tourism from 2012 (with 53 chapters on the languages of Europe) appeared in 2014 in English as 'Lingo'. And now the book is back in Dutch as 'Lingua', after it also briefly visited Spain, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Germany. With each version, the book was enriched and revised; it now has 70 chapters and twice as many pages as the original.

People who have read Language Tourism should certainly not pass up Lingua. Not a single chapter has remained the same, Dorren guarantees in the foreword. That means that Lingua is once again brimming with interesting facts about the many languages spoken in Europe. Why, for example, do they speak such strange German in Switzerland? And did you know that Jan Smit had been called 'Ivan Kovalenko' in Ukraine? A great book to start dreaming about your next European holiday destination during the holidays.

– Erica Renckens, editor 'Talking about language' –

Read more about the 'Across Europe in 69 languages'

The sweaty feet man – About lawsuits &rules (and a lot of hassle)

By Annet Huizing

Actually, this book was originally written for children, but the result was so fruitful that it is actually suitable for anyone from 10 to 100 years old. In order to explain to the reader how Dutch law works (and why), Zilveren Griffel winner Annet Huizing pays attention to all kinds of special lawsuits in this book, so that we gradually get to know Dutch law in its many forms. You will also learn more about the law from other countries, so that you better understand in which respects our law is unique. By the end of this book you'll know a lot of 'rights facts', both remarkable and more serious:from the extent of participation that dogs have to how far freedom of expression goes and why the Dutch government is meddling with sprinkles. The book is a bit on the long side, but, together with the many funny illustrations and the interesting infographics, the smooth tone ensures that it is a pleasant read.

– Marloes van Amerom, editor Mens &Maatschappij –

Mastering your brain – About the role of conscious thinking

By André Aleman

Many neuroscientists and psychologists see unconscious processes in the brain as the main system that determines our behavior. Free will? There is no such thing, is also the widely propagated message in books for a wide audience. Professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry André Aleman therefore disagrees. At the University Medical Center Groningen, he studies, among other things, patients with apathy:a lack of the will to do something. These listless people show that in a normal situation there is such a thing as a conscious will, he argues. He backs up his plea by sifting through the research that would prove that the conscious is an illusion. According to Aleman, it is best to consciously influence our own thinking and acting. With this, 'Mastering your brain' brings an encouraging message for the new year.

– Mariska van Sprundel, editor Brain &Behavior –

Waiter, there's physics in my soup

By Helen Czerski

I already recommended this book for the summer holidays, but you always come across physics. Even on winter days. Helen Czerski enthusiastically shows you how physical laws can be recognized all around us. She explains why burning candles give light and that there is a relationship between popcorn, rockets and elephant trunks. You'll read how ducks keep their feet warm when they walk on the ice and what causes an electric shock during cold, dry weather. Czerski effortlessly connects it all with gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, surface tension, the ideal gas law and a whole host of physical phenomena. By always alternating recognizable examples with an explanation of the physics behind it, she shows how apparently very different things arise from the same principles. An absolute must.

Read a more in-depth review of 'Waiter, there's physics in my soup' here.

– Esther Thole, editor Functional Molecular Systems and Chemical Sciences –

Read more about 'Waiter, there's physics in my soup'

Why do men go bald?

By Sanne Deurloo &Anne van Kessel

If there is nothing for you among all the beautiful books above, we as the Kennislink editors have a good tip for under the tree:our own question books!

When Kennislink was 10 years old, we collected the best reader questions and bundled them in our first book:Why do men go bald? Our editors wrote the answers, together with many scientists. It became a bestseller, and of course we are proud of that. We received so many nice reactions and new questions that 1.5 years later we published our second book:Why do we drink so much coffee? Another year later, the Dutch National Research Agenda asked us to answer the 25 most controversial questions they had been asked in a special issue:Why do we want to know everything?

We still love good, funny, silly questions. So if you've always wondered something, let us know.

– Anne van Kessel, editor Biology –