SOURCE: “Whirling around in Whorls,” in New Statesman, May 27, 1988, pp. 31–32.

In the following review of Chaos, Coyne finds Gleick's book adequate for lay readers, but notes shortcomings in Gleick's incomplete grasp of the topic and in his newspaper-style prose.

Odd how the vocabulary of a newly credulous age seems to be invading even the best guarded of territories. Who would have thought that the words “catastrophe” and “chaos” could have become part of the common currency of that most self-consciously rational of disciplines, mathematics? Perhaps there is more to come? Could other current American predelictions, like the musings of Nostradamus, be quantified, codified and find themselves in the textbooks?

Don't rule it out. James Gleick's book [Chaos] is an object lesson in how, beneath the best explored of surfaces, there can lurk not the occult but—much worse, as far as science is concerned—the unpredictable. Moreover we...