A funny book, if dark comedy is your thing; but rather more over-the-top then I’d like, in certain parts. Professor Michael Beard, a physicist whose one contribution to science won him a Nobel Prize, has shrugged through a series of failed marriages and coasted through a professional life that has seen, aside from his one great accomplishment, essentially no progress. His honorary nomination as head of a renewable energy lab in Britain will wind up giving both his personal and his professional live a jump-start of sorts. The physics here is somewhat interesting, and the politics of science, more so. I was unconvinced by the sketch of a rock star physicist, with all the attendant character flaws - it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me, really. Try as I might, I could only picture Prof. Beard as a tidy, trim man with an NPR sensibility - so it was difficult to really put myself inside the head of a very different sort of character. But: it was a fun read and a reasonably good page-turner.