Like almost all the books of the FFMS essay collection, this one also focuses on a topic from a statistical perspective and merely, or mostly, using data analysis from the most varied (credible) sources.
Carlos Fiolhais should need no presentations given his curriculum, but the truth, as he mentions in the book, is that, unfortunately, we have not yet given science its due value and, therefore, names like his or other physicists, mathematicians and scientists are still not as well known as they should be.
Over the course of about 100 pages, we are introduced to the panorama of science in Portugal, often using direct comparison with other OECD and EU countries. We are also presented with before and after the portuguese revolution information, thus allowing us to understand that access to education, whether related to the area of science or not, had a clear improvement and openness regarding equal access in the period after the revolution. It is also true that all these improvements do not yet place Portugal in a desirable place, so there is still a lot to work on.
I strongly recommend reading the book. I attribute the rating of only 4.1 as the data used is up to 2009, so whoever is looking for more recent information, will have to choose another reading.
Rating 4.1/5
Read in 2021