My last post commented further about book reviews in the physics community. An announcement today that the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has appointed a new editor for its MAA Reviews has reminded me that the mathematical community is doing relatively better on the book review front than the physics community is. I don't read MAA Reviews regularly, but I see that it is a professional-society sponsored source of curated book reviews. They also feature a Basic Library List, a downloadable spreadsheet which includes books they recommend for college and university libraries. The list is annotated with a star system, with 3 stars for books considered essential, 2 stars for strongly recommended, 1 star for "recommended", and zero stars for "suggested". I haven't examined the list in detail, but conceptually this seems to be a good idea, and quite useful for students and self-learners as well.
More broadly, I can't speak to the quality of MAA Reviews, as I'm not a regular reader, but the concept seems like exactly what I think is missing in the physics community. As a bonus, all the content seems to be freely available online. Unfortunately, using the search feature I was able to find only a single reviewed book in the field of fluid mechanics, and only 3 under physics. Its coverage of statistics is not at all comprehensive, with only 6 books showing up in the search feature for statistics, 6 more for probability, with 3 more under probability theory, two under "Statistics and Probability", one more under Bayesian statistics, one each under classification and clustering, one more under data visualization, and one more under data analysis.
The Basic Library List has much better coverage, but no reviews are attached to the entries. Looking at the fluid mechanics sections of the list, I count only 13 titles included, of which only two are rated at 3 stars (essential), both by James Lighthill: his Waves in Fluids and Informal Introduction to Theoretical Fluid Mechanics. Both are excellent choices that I would agree with. There are no 2 star recommendations, but earning a single star are Acheson's Elementary Fluid Mechanics, Lamb's Hydrodynamics, Courant and Friedrichs' Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves, Stoker's Water Waves, and a book I'd not heard of until now, Gary Sod's Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics. Aside from that last one, I would consider the rest as classics. A 14th book, Batchelor's Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, also a classic, appears under "Mathematical Physics: Fluid Mechanics". However there are quite a few other classics that should have been included, many of which were written by physicists or engineers. So, in execution the list might not live up to my expectations, but I suppose opinions about books are always subjective, so that no such list would make everyone happy.
In addition to MAA, I am a member of SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), and their SIAM Review (a journal sent to all members) maintains a healthy book review section.
Anyway, perhaps the physics community needs a source of free, online, curated book reviews in the spirit of MAA Reviews, to replace the fallen books section of Physics Today. A professional society might be a good central place to host one.
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