In one word: poor.
In more words: for fuck's sake, why write this tripe? It's a sea of sweeping historical statements and anecdotes. Three quarters of the book is only tangentially related to music: I don't give a flying fuck that you think Renaissance painting and architecture are related to the perfect fifth. If you want to write about the visual arts, why try to write about music? And for god's sake, do you really need to vomit similes and analogies all over the place? Is it because you don't understand your subject deeply enough to describe it directly?
After a pointless derailment into astrology, Isacoff takes a swipe at meteorologists and wonders how many of them would be happy to be correct only 7% of the time. Really? You write this non-scientific mess and you have the chutzpah to take a poke at meteorology? How out of touch with reality are you, buddy?
Even his grasp of music is tenuous: "[Leonardo invented] a flute in which the tones would glide from one to another, like in a latter-day electronic theremin." Yeah, or A FUCKING SLIDE WHISTLE. I can't decide whether Isacoff is the world's least knowledgable composer, or the world's worst "wanna drop this word in here no matter what" writer.
His grasp of science is even weaker. On page 114 he waffles on about filling a gallon container with litre and quart jugs. His point is that the litre and gallon don't have an integer ratio, but he bumbles about it in such an idiotic manner that you wonder whether he really gets it himself. My best guess is that he finds the metric system so baffling that he wanted to cram it in here. (The terrible example he gives works just as well with alternating 1/2 gallon and 1/3 gallon jugs.)
There's an inexplicable page about coffee and cacao which just made me scream in frustration and scribble "if you don't have anything to say about tuning, shut up." Which is a pretty much how I feel about the book as a whole. What a waste of time.
