Clara’s Verdict
I was halfway through my second cup of tea on a Saturday morning when I started Shoulders of Giants, and I did not stop until the whole thing was done. That is not a usual experience with popular mathematics, a genre that tends to either oversimplify to the point of condescension or overcomplicate to the point of alienation. Jared Flatow finds a third path: he treats mathematics as a narrative subject, following the accumulation of human insight from ancient Greek geometry to electromagnetic theory as though it were a story with protagonists, reversals, and a payoff.
The argument at the heart of the book is that the abstract and the applied are not in tension – that the equations which eventually carried voices and signals across continents were built on centuries of thought that had no practical ambition at all. Euclid was not thinking about telecommunications. Maxwell was not building the internet. And yet the line from their work to ours is direct, if not straight. That insight – that pure mathematical thought accumulates interest and eventually pays out in ways its originators could not have imagined – is genuinely important, and Flatow earns it through specific portraits of specific thinkers rather than merely asserting it from a distance.
About the Audiobook
Published by Quasi Convex Union in March 2026, Shoulders of Giants runs to 7 hours and 17 minutes – long enough for substance, short enough for a weekend listen. It currently holds a 5-star rating from a single Audible UK review. The book is not part of a series. The stated audience is listeners fascinated by mathematics, physics, engineering, or the deeper story behind the modern world, which is a broad and deliberately inclusive tent. The narrative spans from ancient Greek geometry through to the emergence of electromagnetic theory, treating each historical episode as a chapter in a cumulative story rather than as a disconnected survey of the field.
Self-published through Quasi Convex Union, this is a title where the absence of a major publisher’s editorial infrastructure might give some readers pause. On the evidence of the text, those concerns are largely unfounded – the writing is clear, the structure is coherent, and the author’s enthusiasm for the material is evident without becoming overwhelming. This is not a perfect book, but it is a good one, and it deserves more attention than its modest review count currently reflects.
The Narration
Flatow narrates his own book, and this is one of those self-narrations that works precisely because the author’s investment in the material is audible throughout. There is a warmth and enthusiasm in his delivery that no hired narrator could convincingly simulate, because it comes from someone who has spent considerable time thinking about these ideas and genuinely wants to share them. The pacing is measured and the pronunciation of technical and historical names – from Euclid and Pythagoras through to Faraday and Maxwell – is confident and consistent. For a self-published, self-narrated title, the audio production is clean and professional, with none of the room noise or uneven levels that can compromise independent productions.
What Readers Say
A single review from Carl F on the US store awarded five stars and offered a response that illuminates something about the kind of listener this book is written for. He connected the book’s spirit to his own childhood habit of taking things apart to understand how they worked – locks, mechanisms, the internal logic of physical objects – and to a high school geometry teacher whose love of the subject was its own form of transmission. That response – a reader finding in the book a reflection of their own relationship with curiosity and tools – suggests Flatow is reaching the audience he intended. More reviews will accumulate as the title finds its readership.
Who Should Listen?
Strong recommendation for anyone who enjoyed Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem, or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, or Marcus du Sautoy’s work on mathematical history, and wants something that emphasises the human and historical dimensions of how abstract thought becomes practical power. You do not need a mathematics background – the book assumes curiosity rather than prior knowledge, and it is written for the general listener rather than the specialist.
It is a particularly good listen for engineers and physicists who have always worked at the applied end of these disciplines but have never traced where the underlying ideas came from – who use Fourier transforms or Maxwell’s equations daily but have never read the story of the people who discovered them and the decades of pure mathematical work that preceded any practical application. Those looking for mathematical rigour, proofs, or technical depth will need to look elsewhere – this is history and narrative, not a textbook, and it makes no apology for that. The 7-hour runtime is well-judged: substantial enough to develop its argument fully, short enough to feel like a gift rather than a commitment.
