The Human Touch (2007)

The author, Michael Frayn: a Brit known for the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen. The target audience for The Human Touch: anyone who enjoys gaping at the complexities of existence. The topic: everything. Frayn motors through the universe in this fantastic series of essays — imagining the birth of arithmetic, riffing on linguistics, and quibbling with Stephen Hawking about the nature of time, for instance — and he describes all these mind-teasers with a clarity that inspires trust and fondness. Early on, Frayn declares that his meditation will ''go this way and that, without any particular system,'' and he does not break the promise. But no one ever said life was simple.