The subtitle of this book is misleading as Smil specifies that you will not find an all encompassing conclusion of the impact of size at the end of this book. Rather, it’s a set of observations of how size exists in the world, what determines size and its limitations, and the effect size has on how things work. The writing is incredibly dense yet broad; one page may take you through how plate size affects perceptions of portions and that impact on diets to the spacing of columns on Greek temples to comparing retail displays with famous paintings. Smil demystifies things like the 80/20 rule, the Golden Ratio, and Zipfs law on manmade objects (i.e. city sizes). He uses Swift’s Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians to illustrate scaling in humans (which he extends to mammals, animals, then everything from buildings to rivers). He discusses population distributions, both symmetric and asymmetric, and concludes that very little corresponds to these neat and tidy numbers/formulae. A lot of his discussion is taking something that is evident through simple visual observation, and explaining why it is. Smil mentions in some places the application of this knowledge about size (like knowing the dosage of medicine for a seven year old), but I don’t know what the purpose of this book was other than to put some complex observations into print. It’s very likely that it just went over my head.