book reviews

The Tangled Tree, Quammen (2018)

Humans can be forgiven for assuming we’re the dominant species on Earth. The problem with this framing is the word “species.” Microbial organisms swap genes with astonishing frequency, not only in structured exchanges vaguely similar to sex, but also in ways that appear haphazard to human sensibilities: receiving DNA carried by viruses from microbe to microbe, as well as harvesting free-floating DNA. These modes of sharing, collectively called horizontal gene transfer, present great challenges not only to the concept of species, but also to the notion of individuality. David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree is the story of two of the three domains of life on Earth, bacteria and archaea. (Humans, and most other organisms that our bodies are designed to sense, fall within the third domain, eukarya). The recent discovery that archaea is an independent domain, and not simply a subset of bacteria, combined with our increasing realization of the ubiquitousness of horizontal gene transfer, is revolutionizing our understanding of evolutionary history. Microbes don’t always sell books, especially when unconnected to infectious disease, so Quammen deserves praise for even attempting The Tangled Tree—and hearty congratulations for successfully writing an accessible, intelligent, and objective narrative about the uncountable beings that live around and within us. Whatever disastrous or impressive decisions Homo sapiens makes in the centuries to come, the true rulers of Earth will remain on the throne. That’s reason enough to learn their story. 9 ↑ ↓

Quammen, David. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. Simon & Schuster, 2018. Reviewed July 9, 2024.

Life on a Young Planet, Knoll (2003)

There is a kind of science book that’s halfway between popular science and straight-up textbook. Most in this class are written by practicing scientists with an urge to convey their passion to a wider audience. Unfortunately, being a great scientist is not a guarantee of being a great science communicator, and nearly all books in this class vacillate wildly between facile and jargon-heavy text. You can almost see the author hunched over a laptop, determined to convey ideas clearly…and then forgetting themselves, again and again, in the abstruse technicalities they live and breathe daily. And then there is the rare book that, for a given topic, figures it out. Andrew Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet is beautifully written, filled with technical detail, and manages to weave that detail into a marvelous narrative about the evolution of life on Earth. Knoll begins with the Cambrian “explosion” of diversity just over half a billion years ago, and then, like a paleontologist with a shovel, digs deeper and deeper in the first six chapters until he reaches the beginning of life, introducing key geological and evolutionary concepts along the way. Then the book reverses direction and heads slowly back to Cambrian times, the reader now equipped to absorb the story in more precise detail. Along the way, Knoll introduces us to the (always imperfect) scientific methods used to discover the facts, which not only imbues the book with humility but also makes unanswered questions feel exciting instead of overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong: there is a lot in this book that’s difficult for readers untrained in geology and biochemistry. But the sense of wonder gradually builds even if every sentence is not grasped. The veil of the past, and of the solid rock beneath and around us, is every bit as thrilling as what hides in the skies and in the future. 9 ↑ ↓

Knoll, Andrew. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton University Press, 2003. Reviewed June 21, 2024.

At the Edge of Time, Hooper (2018)

Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time was not the first popular science book written by a practicing physicist, but it did kindle public interest in the genre. The quantity of such books has steadily increased, which is theoretically great, but the available selection can feel overwhelming, which is experimentally not great. Dan Hooper’s At the Edge of Time hovers somewhere between useful and necessary. It’s more than useful. Hooper’s explanations of some of the key unsolved questions of modern physics—the hierarchy problem, baryon non-conservation, dark energy, dark matter—are clear and pithy. In particular, he’s one of the world’s leading experts on dark matter, and the book is strongest in exploring the various hypotheses put forward to explain the mysterious substance responsible for nearly a quarter of the universe’s energy. The book is also not quite necessary. With the possible exception of the dark matter sections, other books have trod similar ground equally effectively, and Hooper’s writing fluctuates between lucid and stylistically repetitive. If you’re really interested in dark matter, or if you’ve been breathlessly waiting for a concise update to Steven Weinberg’s 1977/1993 classic The First Three Minutes, then read this book. Otherwise, save your time for other great works in the field (for example, Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps, Gleick’s Chaos, Mack’s End of Everything, Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math, Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World, Feynman’s Character of Physical Law). 7 ↑ ↓

Hooper, Dan. At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe’s First Few Seconds. Princeton University Press, 2019. Reviewed June 12, 2024.

The Fraud, Smith (2023)

“Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England.”

Eliza’s take: So muses the protagonist of Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, a novel about— let’s say— the strange experience of realizing you are an individual living in the midst of collective delusion, and continuing to live anyways. We are carried here by Mrs Eliza Touchet: middle aged but not yet old (“managing decline”), a widow and a housekeeper for her cousin. She has marched and rallied for the end of slavery, the rights of poor men to vote— but always with a bit of restraint. She is a writer, and she endeavors to observe society more than participate in it. She takes notes on the “is this for real?” case sweeping London— an obvious swindler is convincing London’s embittered masses that he is the lost-at-sea son of the aristocracy— but holds herself apart. Of course, believing yourself to be separate is the greatest deception of all. And whether it’s the lingering inheritance from a dead husband who dealt in the slave trade you abhorred, or the budding love for the swindler’s number one defender, or society’s label “spinster” that annotates your self-image— the collective delusion will ensnare you. Real or not, there is no out from participation. Be it 1873 or 2024, what will you make of that? 7 ↑ ↓

Smith, Zadie. The Fraud. Penguin, 2018. Reviewed June 11, 2024.

Lost in Math, Hossenfelder (2018)

I’m guessing many of Sabine Hossenfelder’s interviewees are annoyed. Lost in Math is woven from three threads: an overview of fundamental concepts in physics, written in a lucid, engaging style; the ideas of some of the leading physicists in the world today, captured through personal interviews; and Hossenfelder’s own critique of how unexamined notions of mathematical beauty are undermining progress in physics. The interviews, with some exceptions, largely serve as a foil for the critique, and that’s where I imagine the interviewees responded with a hard “no” on lending their endorsements to the book jacket. But this is an important and brave work. When science, and indeed any part of culture, finds itself helpless in the face of new and hard questions, the right step is to go back to the assumptions and ask what we’ve missed. The alternative is to plow forward convinced that our intuition—which is not personal at all, but rather the sum of evolutionary and societal influences (read: brainwashing, some of which was once possibly useful)—is a reliable guide to the universe. This is a hypothesis that’s been proven wrong again and again, but it remains tempting, for two reasons. One, because the alternative is to retreat into an austere formalism founded on a few clearly stated axioms, an approach which may have hard limits with respect to self-reference (what have you done to us, Kurt Gödel?), and self-reference is at the heart of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, and (as noted by one of Hossenfelder’s interlocutors) the measurement problem is at the heart of almost every current unsolved problem in contemporary physics. Two, and probably even more problematically, it’s much easier to be admired and rich by playing the game than by yelling at the emperor. Hossenfelder has solutions for both issues: get philosophers with a deep knowledge of physics involved in the conversation, and change the incentive structure to reward iconoclastic (but well-theorized and testable) ideas instead of churning out “beautiful” papers better filed on the fiction floor of the library. Fair enough. 9 ↑ ↓

Hossenfelder, Sabine. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Basic Books, 2018. Reviewed June 8, 2024.

Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver (2022)

Olivia’s take: In her novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver gives body and voice to the vast swath of the rural population of the United States who have been afflicted by the opioid crisis. The story follows Damon “Demon” from birth into young adulthood, focusing largely on his teen years. This form of coming-of-age story gives a glimmer of familiarity to an otherwise (to me) entirely unrelatable life story. Demon is raised in rural Appalachia by a single mother who struggles with substance abuse and quickly finds himself adrift in a world where nearly everyone is struggling to keep their head above water. The community bonds that could’ve acted as a net to support this young boy have frayed under the weight of addictive substances. Throughout the story, we see how the monetary incentive to institutionalize pharmaceutical dependency is validated by the self-perpetuating nature of a capitalist healthcare system. As it becomes increasingly hard for people to maintain their connections, a divided and dependent community is produced, diagnosed, and easily taken advantage of. However, Demon Copperhead equally shows that that state of humanity is unnatural. Manufactured destruction and isolation are consistently challenged by the resilience and kindness of human beings. This is embodied in the care and responsibility that Demon, even under the most crushing circumstances, shows to those around him. 9

Bapu’s take: Barbara Kingsolver’s capacity for empathy is astonishing. I don’t know what it feels like to be a poor white child bouncing around foster homes in late 20th century Appalachia, opioid-ravaged bodies falling like leaves all around. But I do know what it’s like to be a boy unsure of one’s worth, desperately seeking love from people who are too scared and hurt to notice. And Kingsolver gets pretty damn close to all that. America needed Demon Copperhead. No work of art could adequately avenge the greed-fueled killing sprees of Purdue Pharma and associated capitalist absurdities, and who knows if the book will help prevent, even marginally, similar injustices in the future. But it chronicles the hell endured by a generation, as well as the caring and endurance that get survivors through. This is not a perfect book. The almost apologetic call-out to David Copperfield is unnecessary—the story of every child that suffers like this is unique and should be told, and anyway the opioid crisis is a very particular chapter of human history—and some key characters, especially Dori, could have been more deeply developed. But perfection is not as important as honesty, heart-in-my-pen damn-the-torpedoes honesty, which in the end is what elevates the practice of both art and love. 10 ↑ ↓

Kingsolver, Barbara. Demon Copperhead. Harper, 2022. Reviewed May 30, 2024.

The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington (1928)

Eddington assembled The Nature of the Physical World from a series of popular lectures that he had given in 1927, just months after Heisenberg and Schrödinger and their collaborators published their breakthrough papers. It’s remarkable that Eddington gives such a lucid exposition of the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics—and also general relativity, which was itself only thirteen years old—without the benefit of hindsight. And perhaps ironic, since there is little sign that these implications, despite their almost immediate acceptance by the scientific mainstream, have filtered into popular culture. GR and QM are not, in their broad outlines, difficult to understand. But they do demand that we discard the deepest of our intuitions. It’s one thing to accept that we are not at the center of the universe; it’s another to accept that space and time and causality are not what we think they are. That they are not even close to what we think they are. One day children will read Eddington and marvel at the chasm between knowing and feeling. 10 ↑ ↓

Eddington, Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World. Macmillan, 1928. Reviewed May 30, 2024.

Chaos, Gleick (1987)

The phrase “popular science” carries a patina of inauthenticity. We expect books in the genre to be simplified and maybe even slightly inaccurate representations of scientific concepts that take decades of training to fully absorb. In a general sense that’s true, especially when deep understanding requires specialized skills. But we hold other types of writing to a different standard. We don’t believe, for example, that Tolstoy dumbed down his portrayal of human nature in War and Peace—an understanding that was surely hard-won, spanning decades of a different kind of training—so that the masses could comprehend. No: the most successful art does not evade the simultaneous challenges of truth and communicability (not to mention beauty, and also entertainment). The world is subtle and complex, but good writers find trails to the mind. James Gleick is a good writer. Forty years after the initial publication of Chaos, the study of systems whose evolution is both deterministic and (almost) unpredictable continues to revolutionize science. We’ve long known about chaos—Newton spoke of the three-body problem in Principia Mathematica in 1687—but only in the last half of the 20th century did we develop viable methods for characterizing and analyzing such systems. And the knowledge of chaos brings us ever closer to a vexing? liberating? philosophical question: if much of the universe turns out to be understandable but not predictable, does free hold still hold allure? What happens—personally, politically—when we let go of shaping the future and instead see ourselves as stewards of what is and whatever will be? Gleick doesn’t directly engage such questions, but he gives us, in just under three hundred pages, the scientific education to make our ponderings sincere and sophisticated. 10 ↑ ↓

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin Books, 1987. Reviewed May 21, 2024.

The Passage of Power, Caro (2012)

There are many reasons to admire The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I’ll focus on just one, which comes out more strongly in Passage to Power than in the previous three volumes: the impossibility of defining a human being by the outcomes of life, because those outcomes, how much ever we want to point to the quasi-determinism of genetics or the influence of culture or the pressure of political institutions or even the inertia of history, are a few lone threads in an immense tapestry of events. LBJ was a few bullets away from being forgotten, master of the Senate though he was; and he might have been a few timely words of advice—”Mr. President, we cannot win this war”—away from successfully embedding in American hearts a desperately needed love of equality that could exceed our love of liberty. This is not (just) an argument for the primacy of contingency and “one damn thing after another,” or for randomness over pattern. The problem is fundamentally statistical: there may indeed be a determinism at the heart of social change—if there is, surely the function is chaotic: deterministic but unpredictable—but linking who a person is and where they came from to why things turned out the way they did, to a country’s fate, is a fool’s errand. We write biographies of people and not particles for reasons that seem obvious. Shouldn’t we keep following the question and ask why we’re writing biographies of people instead of planets? What do we hope to learn from single lives that isn’t wildly overdetermined? Get that last volume done, Bob and Ina. We need you. 11 ↑ ↓

Caro, Robert. The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV: The Passage to Power. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Reviewed May 5, 2024.

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Volume 1: Space, Time, and Motion, Carroll (2022)

Sean Carroll has a noble mission. He wants (we the) people to chat about physics the way we chat about sports or the movies, as an obvious subject for coffee dates with friends, party conversation, family reunions. He also has a novel hypothesis for how to make it happen: instead of dumbing down the material to sell books, instead work very hard—as a writer, lecturer, and podcast host—to entice the audience into giving more and more energy to exploring complex ideas. The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is his most ambitious experiment yet. Carroll doesn’t just ignore the standard publisher’s advice to science writers— “every equation you include cuts your readership by half”—he gleefully employs equations as his primary teaching tool. The experiment isn’t entirely successful. By the last few chapters, anyone without a pre-existing comfort with differential equations and linear algebra will have to work very hard, using supplementary materials, to follow the details. But Carroll’s effort is badly needed, and the result worthy of admiration. There is a yawning gap between the knowledge of working physicists (which is too deep for most of us to have the time to approach) and the content of most popular physics books (which is too shallow to truly alter the way we see the world ). Trying to fill that space, equations and all, is probably the only way for physics, and science more broadly, to assert a place at the heart of culture. 8 ↑ ↓

Carroll, Sean. The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Volume 1: Space, Time, and Motion. Dutton, 2022. Reviewed May 5, 2024.

Master of the Senate, Caro (2002)

Robert Caro has spent nearly fifty years writing about Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States and the politician most responsible for the great civil rights and social safety legislation of the 1960s—and for the horrors of the Vietnam War. Half a lifetime spent studying another man’s lifetime: a premise worthy of Borges. We will have to wait for the denouement—will it be revealed that a young LBJ had scribbled, on toilet paper stashed deep in the cellars of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, the story of Bob Caro’s life?—because Caro is still hard at work on the fifth and ultimate volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, arguably the finest work of biography written in the English language. But of course Caro isn’t really writing about one man. He’s writing about the contradictions of America—our admirable and dangerous ambition, our self-loathing and meanness, our nobility and sometimes tenderness in times of reckoning. And Caro is writing about the nature of human power. Corruption is one of his themes, to be sure, but political skill is even more so: the artistry of those who see power dormant before them and know how to awaken and amplify it to reshape the world, sometimes for the good and sometimes, possibly, forever. It’s not that LBJ is uniquely symbolic of twentieth-century America or is the Platonic ideal of political skill. What makes LBJ an ideal lens for studying America and the nature of power is that he that could not abide being anything less than enormous, and artifically-inflated-and-thus-deflatable subjects make the writer-philosopher’s task easier. Master of the Senate is the finest book (so far) of Caro’s project, in part because LBJ’s tenure as Senate Majority Leader were his most self-fulfilled, and thus most revealing, years—and also because Caro himself had mastered the delivery of his philosophy, which, more than anything else, is about doing everything possible in pursuit of a goal and then letting the chips fall where they may. Robert Caro is 88 years old and he will not be rushed. One can be confident that one’s work is worthwhile when death feels like the most minor of considerations. Death, which is not failure. If only LBJ had had the same thought in 1968. 11 ↑ ↓

Caro, Robert . The Years of Lyndon Johnson III: Master of the Senate. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Reviewed January 21, 2024.

The Noonday Demon, Solomon (2001)

Noonday Demon is a mix of cultural history, scientific knowledge (as of 2001), and first-person narrative about severe depression. All feel necessary to what Andrew Solomon is trying to create: nothing less than (as the subtitle suggests) a comprehensive map of the most desolate country in the human universe. The history is fascinating, although Solomon’s well-intentioned attempts to represent a culturally diverse understanding of depression feel a little forced. The science is thorough but haphazardly organized. The personal accounts, however, are the irreproachable beating heart of the book—honest, devastating accounts that likely have saved many lives over the past two decades. I have a friend, an ex-housemate, who fought depression for years. I now understand a little more what she was feeling behind that closed door. I expect that many people—not only sufferers of depression, but loved ones too—had the same thought after reading Noonday Demon. Solomon has given a great gift to all of us, and hopefully to himself too. 8 ↑ ↓

Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Simon and Schuster, 2001. Reviewed January 21, 2024.

Night , Wiesel (1958)

An unencumbered review of Elie Wiesel’s classic narrative Night, sixty-five years and millions of copies later, is no longer possible. The book has become cultural intuition, a tool used for thinking about the Holocaust. Wiesel himself is remembered less as a flesh-and-blood person than a symbol of peace—or, better, a symbol of unceasing demand for peace—amidst the many horrors of the twenty-first century. One could argue that other books and other people might have played the same role had Wiesel died, as millions of others did, in the death camps. But there is still something strange about Night that marks it as unique not only among Holocaust narratives, but more generally as a work of art. The manuscript is short and the writing simple—”I was more afraid of having said too much than too little,” Wiesel writes in the preface to the new translation by his wife Marion—and the feeling of scantness, of bare necessity, gradually overwhelms. We the readers want more, and as the force of that need grows, so do the power of the sentences. The snow, the soup, Wiesel’s father’s tired, dying face: all is here, and all will remain. 8 ↑ ↓

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill and Wang, 2006 [1958]. Reviewed December 28, 2023.

Palestinian Identity , Khalidi (1997)

Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity, written at a time when a two-state solution didn’t seem so far away, has a clear goal: to establish the Palestinian people as a nation with a history, and thus possessed of the right of self-determination. Golda Meir once remarked that “there [is] no such thing as Palestinians,” and this trope—that Palestinian identity was invented for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel—lingers as poisonous subtext. Khalidi’s careful scholarship, drawing from a variety of private and public sources, decisively refutes Meir’s (consciously) blithe statement: the roots of Palestinian nationhood are clearly visible in the years before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, and are only partly linked to the rise of Zionism. What about antiquity? Khalidi’s most powerful contribution in Palestinian Identity might be his subtle rejection of the need to establish legitimacy through deep history. Nations are imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson’s felicitous phrase, and the use of modernity and antiquity in this imagining process is almost always exploitative, not rigorous; the countries here on Earth in 2024 are products of chance, power, and cultural marketing. The nation-state and its fuel, tribal politics, can’t pass from human history quickly enough, frankly. In the meantime, we tell stories to correct the stories, hoping for a quantum of justice. 9 ↑ ↓

Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity. Columbia University Press, 1997. Reviewed December 23, 2023.

From Beirut to Jerusalem , Friedman (1989)

There’s a certain kind of first album that makes the listener feel the artist hasn’t held anything back. All the best ideas are on the table and both the producer and the artist, anxious about the artwork’s appeal, have been appropriately ruthless in trimming and adjusting. Thomas Friedman wrote From Beirut to Jerusalem when he was in his mid-30s. He’d already gained acclaim for his exceptional reporting on the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, but he hadn’t yet ascended to the apostlehood of “radical centrism”; he hadn’t yet made a religion out of facile narratives of Hobbesian Third World jungles and world-peace-through-Lexuses. He was, in other words, relatively humble (although Edward Said would vehemently disagree). Humility unlocks the best of Friedman: the ability to read between the lines of political bluster, to intertwine warm-blooded quotes and cold-blooded analysis, to stay on the correct side of the line separating refreshing bluntness and troubling dilettantism. Nearly thirty-five years after its publication, From Beirut to Jerusalem is, surprisingly and sadly, still an incisive investigation of the battle lines within and across Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel. Get that first album hunger back, Thomas. 8 ↑ ↓

Friedman, Thomas. From Beirut to Jerusalem. Random House, 1989. Reviewed December 10, 2023.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Khalidi (2020)

Rashid Khalidi is the rare academic that’s managed to build a solid scholarly reputation—based largely on his works about the modern history of the Middle East, and especially the rise of Arab nationalism—without compromising on real-world engagement, most notably in 1990s peace talks between the PLO and the Israeli government. Hundred Years shows both these sides of Khalidi, and that’s good and bad. Good because Khalidi’s talent for meticulous history makes passionate arguments convincing—especially the idea of Israel as a settler colonial state, a thesis which feels undeniable by the end of the book. Bad because one begins to notice, in a sentence here and a paragraph there, passion filling a space where a fact or an opposing viewpoint should reside. There is little in the book, for example, about Palestinian attacks on civilians, either during the British Mandate or during the upsurge in violence in the early 2000s during the Second Intifada. Khalidi might say that his work is a corrective to the greater global attention paid to Israeli than Palestinian suffering, despite the much higher body count in the West Bank and Gaza. That’s a fair point, but the purpose of walking the line between advocacy and history is to reach the unconverted, and sometimes the only way to do so is by giving the ‘other side’ a voice. Hundred Years will serve future generations as an eloquent summary of Palestinian resistance. Whether it serves the needs of the present is less clear. 6 ↑ ↓

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020. Reviewed November 25, 2023.

One Palestine, Complete, Segev (1999)

As I write this, the war between Israel and Hamas continues. At least 1,200 Israelis died in the Hamas attacks of October 7th; more than 12,000 Gazans, including several thousand children, have died in the subsequent Israeli shelling. Tom Segev is one of Israel’s “New Historians,” a group of authors defined by their questioning of conventional Zionist founding myths. One Palestine, Complete focuses on the British Mandate, the 1917-1947 interregnum between Ottoman rule and the establishment of Israel. Segev’s argument is simple: the British set the stage for Zionism’s success. The why and how are more complex: general political dithering in the face of dying empire; extraordinarily effective Zionist lobbying; the (paradoxically) anti-semitist belief that Jews ran the world. In the end, the British simply gave up, handing Palestine over to the newly formed United Nations, which drew up a two-state solution—at the time, victory for the Zionists—no one thought would work. War immediately erupted, and the present invasion of Gaza is just the latest chapter. Segev’s history comes with ideological filters, as does every history, but his account is diligent and persuasive. The personal stories of Jews and Arabs living under the Mandate, drawn largely from letters, are especially powerful. One Palestine, Complete doesn’t offer obvious answers to resolve the conflict, but it roots our understanding in a few fundamental facts. Zionism and Arab nationalism in Palestine arose around the same time, just before the fall of the Ottomans, and partly (but only partly) in reaction to one another; the Holocaust was only indirectly responsible for the establishment of Israel, although it strengthened the case for robust Jewish self-defense; both sides know that altering the demographic facts on the ground—dispossession, forced transfer, immigration—matters most of all, much more than claims rooted in antiquity or human rights. A two-state solution seems no more likely to succeed in 2024 than in 1948, even if this generation of leaders is willing. Such an arrangement would buttress, not weaken, the claims of both sides. Fear and righteousness, justified or not, would live unabated at the heart of both cultures, and violence would always be a word away. Maybe the only hope is that younger generations come to value secular democracy over the blood and tears of their ancestors: a one-state solution born of letting go. But forgiveness and repentance are the largest and most unfair of expectations. 9 ↑ ↓

Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete. St. Martin’s Press, 2000 [1999]. Reviewed November 19, 2023.

Imagined Communities, Anderson (1983)

The influence of Imagined Communities in social science circles is due in part to its brilliant title, which immediately evokes Anderson’s theme: that nations are not objectively ‘real’ lineages of blood, language, or culture, but rather bizarre and contingent collective inventions of the late second millennium AD. Contingent, that is, on the chance juxtaposition of “print capitalism”—money to be made in mass production of books—the hijacking of New World colonial administrative structures by creole outcasts, the wholesale piracy of these New World ideas by 19th and 20th century republican movements, and a host of smaller forces. Every piece of this argument can be and has been challenged. But the details of Anderson’s thesis matter less than the simple and unforgettable idea of the nation as artistry, not destiny. Anderson himself is no prophet of the death of nationalism. One detects in Anderson’s prose, partly obscured by the Marxist emphasis on material drivers of historical change, a note of wistfulness about the loss of a shared history, real or not. But the possibility of re-imagining something better, less bloody, less needful of indefensible myth, also lurks between the lines. It’s less clear in 2023 than in 1848 or 1945 whether the nation-state will persist. Doubt is a good and honest thing. A true prophecy guarantees—by dint of materialism or probability or whatever improvement on astrology you prefer—that the thing prophesied is the one thing that surely will not happen. Better to wait in the fog and be thrilled by the haunting light in the distance. 9 ↑ ↓

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983. Reviewed November 11, 2023.

Blood Meridian, McCarthy (1985)

For the last decade of his life, Cormac McCarthy was a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s leading center for the study of complex systems. The mission of SFI is to resolve the entire universe—galaxies, economies, genomes—into patterns that are roughly comprehensible to a bipedal, self-conscious ape. This is not a humble mission, but give the ape a slide rule and a dog-eared copy of Blood Meridian in the other, and it has a whisper of a chance. Beware the journey, however: McCarthy’s novels are filled with violence so savage that the reader must stop from time to time to take a gasping breath. It’s not gratuitous violence, and neither is McCarthy interested in the roots, evolutionary or historical, of war. His world is just the world as it is, the world we force ourselves to forget is out there (and in here). Blood Meridian has its antecedents and influences and themes: Moby Dick, Manifest Destiny, the triangular war between god and nature and the ape, theodicy, free will, immortality, hard-won decency—and, yes, the order of the universe and what we do with dimly seeing eyes. But McCarthy’s masterpiece is not reducible to any or all of this. The raw, bleeding heart of the question—of living—is within these pages. Judge Holden’s primeval and future nemesis sparks fire from stone in the desert. Who are the bone gatherers? 11 ↑ ↓

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. Random House, 1985. Reviewed November 5, 2023.

In Pursuit of Memory, Jebelli (2017)

I—the hologram of self—am body and mind. To slowly lose the agility and strength of my body, and also its beauty, is painful. To imagine one day losing the capacities of my mind is horrifying, a near-complete negation of self. Fifty million people in the world suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a number that could nearly triple by mid-century. The toll could be measured not only in years of life lost, but also in fear of what’s coming, the immense burden on caregivers, the enormous cost to health systems. Joseph Jebelli’s book is more or less a literature review of the scientific frontier as it was in 2017. This is a compliment: the book is precise, exhaustive, and unflaggingly compelling. Jebelli describes each strand of research without bias—that is, without naïve hope or cynicism. The prognosis is not cheery—many promising leads but few effective drugs or therapies to show for it—but Jebelli’s voice itself, and the voices of the patients and caregivers he interviews, is a source of strength. Everyone is committed. No one has given up, and no one will. 9 ↑ ↓

Jebelli, Joseph. In Pursuit of Memory. Little, Brown Spark, 2017. Reviewed October 30, 2023.

Artifices, Borges (1944)

The six stories of Artifices were included as an addendum to a second printing of Borges’ earlier work The Garden of Forking Paths; the collections were then sold together in a single volume called Fictions. The two sets of stories are meaningfully distinct, however. Garden lays out Borges’ cryptic philosophy of time and space; Artifices explores the implications of his metaphysics in narrative. Regarding the progression of Borges’ ideas in this light reveals the monstrous task he’s given himself in Artifices : to retell pieces of history—our history—through the eyes of an alien, and perhaps clearer, intelligence. (His first volume, A Universal History of Iniquity, might have had the same goal, but was burdened with timidity). In one story, the young man Funes is liberated by paralysis to see the entirety of the world; in another, the minor scholar Nils Runeberg divines the true identity of God’s Son. Borges doesn’t reveal the nature of these characters—if not aliens, then demigods? demons?—but they are at once deeply familiar, utterly inhuman, and irresistible. And that isn’t a bad description of Borges’ oeuvre as a whole. 10 ↑ ↓

Borges, Jorge Luis. Fictions. Penguin Books, 2000 [1944]. Reviewed October 22, 2023.

The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges (1941)

This is not a book of short stories: this is a philosophical system. Borges’ work deals with the nature of mind, time, space, memory—concepts that frame the experience of a self-conscious being in the universe. Concepts, not indisputable physical phenomena, and that is the point. These things are so fundamental to how we perceive reality that it’s near-impossible to know how to question whether they, or the forms our cultures give them, are nothing more than buried imaginings. That Borges successfully does so, that upon finishing the last page of Garden the reader sees the planet anew, wondering if it’s a planet at all, is astonishing. To accomplish this using nothing more than well-worn symbolic systems—marks written on a page, known words, a standard grammar—is incomprehensible. The philosophical system itself is not sui generis. It rests on a foundation of quantum mechanics, relativity, the epistemology of mathematics, Renaissance idealism, and millennia-old theology from around the world. But revolutions need not be conjured from thin air. Nor do their leaders need to know exactly what lies at the end of the road; they need only to force the first crumbling of something once seen as invincible. Nothing is more invincible than the thing that’s doing the seeing. 11 ↑ ↓

Borges, Jorge Luis. The Garden of Forking Paths. Penguin Classics, 2018 [1941]. Reviewed October 22, 2023.

A Universal History of Iniquity, Borges (1935)

Jorge Luis Borges’ first collection of short stories is a rough draft, a low-stakes playground for ideas that would later become byzantine explorations of time and mind. Borges himself was dismissive of Universal History—”there is nothing beneath all the storm and lightning”—but there is something wildly original that lurks within these (faux) biographies of (real-life) killers and scoundrels. The trifling and impossible nature of biography, all biography. The meaning revealed by deliberate distortion of events. The synthesis, as David Foster Wallace has pointed out, of killer and victim, of writer and reader. “The lord of the nethermost heaven—the shadow of shadows of yet other shadows—is He who reigns over us, and his fraction of divinity tends towards zero”, writes Borges. Peel the wallpaper of mind: self, time, and space begin to wither. Keep peeling, and God is on his knees, praying to gunmen and pirates and frauds. 8 ↑ ↓

Borges, Jorge Luis. A Universal History of Iniquity. Penguin Classics, 2004 [1935]. Reviewed October 20, 2023.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs (1961)

Let’s get this out of the way: Jane Jacobs is not fair to her enemies. Death and Life‘s arguments are based on selective evidence—on unjustified faith in replicating a small set of neighborhoods that, by Jacobs’ own admission, are built on idiosyncratic foundations. But some books are so necessary, so shockingly imaginative, in confronting and resolving a dilemma, that unfairness is besides the point. Death and Life is a creative act; it’s not, as Jacobs claims, an inductive exercise. The thing she creates is a blueprint for accepting, and even happily welcoming, the unstoppable urbanization of human life. The components of the blueprint itself are simple: mixed-use neighborhoods, short blocks, a gently aging building stock, higher density. The consequence is even simpler: sidewalks brimming with life. Jacobs’ enemies, most notably Lewis Mumford, derided the book as the work of a dilettante. Sixty-plus years later, the criticisms seem petty. Anyone who’s spent time in Brasilia knows the hollowness of Le Corbusier’s skyscraper-garden city fantasy, and anyone’s who’s stepped foot in an American suburb can’t help thinking: something is wrong here. And yet Jacobs’ ideas, for all their influence—in popular culture, planning schools, and political circles—have not transformed the world. Neither did the Buddha’s. It’s possible that the shape of our suffering, and also the shape of our cities, reflects in some anxious and ugly sense what we actually want. Security, perhaps, or forgetting pain through stimulation. This is the most powerful argument for those who would shelve Death and Life among other naïvely utopian works. But the book nonetheless remains on the shelf. It waits for a generation that fears slow and meaningless dying more than it fears instability, a generation with sufficient motivation, finally, to solve the other half of the design riddle: us. 10 ↑ ↓

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Modern Library, 2011 [1961].

Postwar, Judt (2006)

Europe could have, and should have, crumbled at some point between 1913 and now. The deaths of sixty million or more over the course of two horrific wars; Soviet-subsidized authoritarian terror behind the Iron Curtain; and, above all, the destruction of the core colonial illusion, that on this continent the lamp of civilization shines bright across the world. These catastrophic happenings should have lead to the cultural demise of anything approximating an European identity. Instead the idea of Europe is stronger than ever, politically as well as culturally; and—oddly, and to the justified resentment of previously subject peoples across the world (not to mention the US and China)—the future might be European. That’s good if the European label means innovations in social democracy and a commitment to critical remembrance of history; bad if it means suicidal innovations in demographic intolerance, a path that looks equally likely. Judt’s magisterial Postwar contains a lifetime’s worth of intriguing ideas, but one stands above the rest: Europe gradually learned that the memory of murders, of crimes, is everywhere, threaded into skin and brick and the air, and that was (or hopefully will be) its salvation. There are other countries, including my own, that would do well to learn the same message. 8 ↑ ↓

Judt, Tony. Postwar. Penguin, 2006.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt (1963)

Eichmann in Jerusalem is justly celebrated as one of the most important works of 20th-century century political philosophy. Arendt mobilizes rigorous analysis and detailed history in pursuit of an answer to the most practical question of all: why evil? This is a question beyond philosophy. This is theodicy, or rather the final destruction of any motivation for theodicy, because Arendt’s answer proposes dissolution of the boundary between good and evil: the greatest evil is the sum of small acts of willful thoughtlessness. This is a statement with the power to upend our most cherished of illusions. Others would make a similar point, and maybe more clearly—Stanley Milgram in his obedience studies, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago—but Arendt’s dispassionate voice somehow feels deeper, its nuances less predictable. The book is not perfect; in a quasi-scholarly work, some engagement with other theories of evil, or at least alternative theories of the particular evil of the Nazis, would have been useful and humble. But Eichmann in Jerusalem changed forever how we interpret the darkest chapters of history and, more importantly, helps us redirect the present away from approaching horrors. The book helps us think, and that, given Arendt’s thesis, is among the greatest of literary achievements of any century. 10 ↑ ↓

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.

Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner (1936)

Somehow Faulkner gets it. I have a friend that says the vast majority of White people don’t feel guilt, that guilt is a hangup of California and Boston. He says that what happened 150 or 200 years ago is not on people’s minds; that what they see, think, feel is other people getting ahead of them in line, being given unfair advantages. Another acquaintance, a grad school classmate, makes long arguments on social media about how people of color are in fact better off without affirmative action; that dropout rates for unqualified students are higher, dooming them to worse life paths. His concern, too transparent, is that his half-white, half-Asian child not be doubly burdened by affirmative action for other races—a basic instinct that gives rise to paragraphs of well-written, poorly researched arguments. It’s worthless asking: if even hyper-educated, ostensibly liberal White folks don’t quite get it, then it feels like a long journey to the majority of Americans getting it.

And yet Faulkner does, somehow. There is inside of Sutpen and Henry and Quentin a kind of rage at themselves for having gained what they didn’t deserve. A ghost of redemption lives inside them, an undefinable combination of loss, of shame, of recognition of the equal humanity of others; and yet their overweening human ambition, the preference of indistinct pride and grievance, defeats the (cold and ultimately warm) light of truth.

There’s only one character in Faulkner’s story: the South. Cultural communities are defined by language, by political proclamations of control, by the long-held rule of a family, clan, tribe, religion. But in all these cases the frontier is a hazy zone. Languages shade into one another, the border dwellers are bilingual; the workers, migrants, cross back and forth regardless of political boundaries; families can’t exercise their dominion in every moment, every place. The South is different: it was defined by legislation, by the ability of one person to hold another in bondage. It is defined, and strangely continues to be defined 160 years later, by slavery.

In that sense maybe the South is an unfortunate victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, historically. The raw fact that humans could and did own one another in almost every place on Earth throughout history reveals how remarkable freedom from bondage as a cultural and legal norm really is–something unprecedented, and perhaps the real revolution that America represents. Represents not because the US was or is a leading light in the abolition of slavery, but because it defined itself by the struggle between slavery and abolition—-and continues to define itself that way. We haven’t escaped the ghosts; that’s where I differ with my friend. White people may not be aware of the ghosts around us, may not feel the weight inside of them, but our country does.

Faulkner’s sole character is old, depressingly old, musty, in decline, painfully aware of its own obsolescence; and it’s also too young, like Henry, to know what to do with its contradictions, with its heaviness, the grief of loss, of a sinful national character exposed and defeated. The Civil War was not about reuniting a nation, no matter how many Union soldiers fought precisely for that cause and not for the abolition of slavery. The Civil War was about a terribly self-loathing people fighting to preserve a livable notion of themselves the only way they knew how: by focusing their aggression on the enemy outside, the enemy representing and judging their sin, and not on what they really hated, the sin and the weakness inside.

Absalom, Absalom is about that loss: not of the war, but of the decision-making process itself. Sutpen can’t think of himself as married to a black family, so he flees Haiti, and he takes his ‘wild’ (Faulkner’s irony: they’re the only ones in the book who do the civilized thing: take the opportunity of freedom when it appears before them) slaves with him, fights those slaves, perhaps as an argument to himself that he’s not escaping, but rather finding a new ground to dominate. Henry can’t accept, even with the promise of brotherhood and love, the idea that Bon would be his sister’s, and thus his own, equal, with a Black wife and family, with his own Black blood. Judith is like her father, simply: she believes it is her destiny to dominate, and she waits—naively, like a child, too young—for that destiny to arrive. Rosa can’t understand her father, who is the only one in the book who actually reflects honestly the despair, the impossibility, of the situation; and not understanding her father or her sister, all she has is hate for Sutpen, scorn for her father, and perhaps anger for herself at making the decisions she did.

So if Faulkner can ‘get’ the South, get what’s going on inside, then why can’t we all? What keeps self-realization at bay? Hate, deep group sin, has a way out. Why hold on instead of taking a way out, even if it means sacrificing a generation or two? 11 ↑ ↓

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! Random House: New York, 1936. ISBN: 9780679732181.

The Character of Physical Law, Feynman (1965)

Science is driven by a quasi-mystical hope: that our senses and minds, despite being adapted for survival and replication and not understanding, can intuit the deepest secrets of nature. And yet we must also allow ourselves to feel things we can’t understand, to hear rhythms that defy easy communication but lie just this side of inscrutable mystery. Richard Feynman’s wonderful Character of Physical Law is a love letter to the rhythms of nature. The chapters cover Feynman’s own sense of the most fundamental aspects of this rhythm: gravity, mathematics, the conservation principles, symmetry, time, quantum mechanics, and the search for knowledge itself. Physics has advanced beyond what was known in 1965 (albeit much less than was hoped or expected), but a sincere love letter never shows its age. For the patient reader—those willing to re-read a sentence until the meaning is ready to reveal itself—Feynman’s work hasn’t been bettered as an introduction to the grandest sweep of physical knowledge. 9 ↑ ↓

Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. British Broadcasting Corporation: London, 1965. ISBN: 9780262560030.

Black Holes and Time Warps, Thorne (1994)

“Don’t overestimate your reader’s knowledge,” the maxim goes, “or underestimate their intelligence.” Kip Thorne, one of the world’s foremost authorities on gravity, walks the line better than most. Three decades after its publication, Black Holes and Time Warps remains the best non-technical treatment of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity and their many 20th century implications. Thorne’s writing is fluid and without pretension, and so the subject matter, though often challenging to non-physicists, feels accessible. (The elegant hand drawings and the non-standard font help as well.) And what marvelous subject matter it is! Thorne’s chronological telling conveys the excitement of discovery while remaining humble about open questions. Many works written by practicing scientists make little effort to distinguish between established, common knowledge and the personal (often speculative) territory of one’s own research program. Thorne, instead, makes it a point to talk about his own errors and turn towards the mysteries that remain. 10 ↑ ↓

Thorne, Kip. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. WW Norton & Company: New York, 1994. ISBN: 9780393312768.

The First Few Minutes, Weinberg (1977)

It’s both reassuring and depressing that Steven Weinberg’s classic monograph is still a good reference to the first few minutes of the universe. The cosmological portrait laid out here is largely confirmed by subsequent observations, but progress in filling the remaining gaps in our understanding has been disappointingly slow. The moment of universal birth is still clouded from view, awaiting a testable theory of quantum gravity. As for the book itself, Weinberg successfully navigates the difficult middle ground between the goofy imprecision of many popular science works and the unhelpful insularity of professional physicists writing for each other. The writing is clear. Still, Weinberg does little in the way of hand-holding. Second and third readings are useful (and also possible, given the book’s brevity), and a gentle text like Dan Hooper’s At the Edge of Time may pave the way for Weinberg’s more technical account. But it’s all time well-spent. The first few minutes is a place of fire and mind-bending transformation, the forge of the nature of reality. Stay awhile and be warmed. 8 ↑ ↓

Weinberg, Steven. The First Few Minutes. Basic Books: New York, 1993 [1977]. ISBN:9780465024377.

The Immortal King Rao, Vara (2022)

At its best, The Immortal King Rao refreshes big, ageless tensions. Is a more peaceful, prosperous global order worth the loss of individual autonomy? Is capitalism a destructive end state, a dark and passing night of the species soul, or a telescoping of human potential, good and bad? At its worst, the book is a failed mash-up of genres and themes, a collection of literary ideas never quite executed, characters never quite made flesh. We will be that which we have always been, Vara seems to say. Fine. But time is running out for Hothouse Earth, and one might feel more empowered reading Dostoevsky and Darwin and Rawls and doing the mash-up…autonomously. 5 ↑ ↓

Vara, Vauhini. The Immortal King Rao. WW Norton & Company, 2022. ISBN: 9780393542255.

Infinite Powers, Strogatz (2019)

Strogatz makes the case for calculus being, in the words of Richard Feynman, “the language God talks.” The evidence is compelling; jury selection is the harder part. Those already convinced of the glories of calculus might yawn a bit at the self-conscious effort to include example after example from everyday life—”Really, calculus is all around!”—while those seeking a gentle introduction might be intimidated by the diverse compendium of topics. (Hats off for even attempting a popular treatment of Fourier transforms.) A historical approach might have been more effective. 6 ↑ ↓

Strogatz, Steven. Infinite Powers. Mariner Books, 2019. ISBN: 9781328879981.

Euphoria, King (2014)

Euphoria is based (very) loosely on the life of Margaret Mead, but that’s a passing curiosity; Mead’s life is far more interesting than what’s portrayed here. King’s novel is less historical fiction than an investigation of the exoticism of Northern anthropology, and Northerners themselves. The anthropologists studying “savage” cultures were blind to their own personal extractive savagery, of course, but also blind to the weirdness of modernity—the hypocritical sexual mores, the desperate search for meaning in the market and state, which are the places one is least likely to find answers. King has cleverly chosen her subject and written a page-turner too. What more than we ask? Humanization of the other, maybe. I understand cardboard natives are the point, but more depth of emotion—the sorrow of Xambun, at least, which seems like a softball request—feels essential. Maybe that’s the problem: we can never know others well enough to fairly write them into the story. Understood. But there are many other stories to tell, and read, than this one. 4 ↑ ↓

King, Lily. Euphoria. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780802123701.

Innumeracy, Paulos (1988)

The “most pernicious of these misconceptions is that mathematics is nothing more than computation,” Paulos writes. What is math? A way of thinking that exalts both truth and ignorance. Number theory and logic don’t care who’s delivering proofs from the Book or why; their only concern is that we arrive at an elegance completely independent of any personal judgment we can make of each other. It may be true that this elegance is not a glimpse of the natural world, but rather of the innermost recesses of our minds. No matter. That’s as close to the heart of beauty as we can manage, and it will have to do: if we can’t know, we can still participate. Probability, meanwhile, is the science of ignorance, the method of coming as close as we can to a physical world that disappears into the haze when we peer too closely, of dispensing with the destructive illusions of certainty. Paulos’s book is too disorganized to be essential. His final defense that he’s motivated not by anger but by the divinity of absurdity is unconvincing; he’s clearly frustrated at our fascination with horoscopes and gods, saddened by our fear of a force so pure and equitable. I’m glad for his anger and his imperfect instruction. We’ve got a long road to walk, and it’s not cold rationality that awaits us, but rather the warmth of a universal hearth, a home even for the most hopelessly stubborn of species. 5 ↑ ↓
Paulos, John Allen. Innumeracy. Holt McDougal, 2017. ISBN: 9780809058402.

Your Brain is a Time Machine, Buonomano (2017)

We don’t know what time is. Human brains experience time as a flow of events. The events that appear in our memory, or are chronicled by others, are gone forever. The events that will one day arrive are untouchable right now. Only the present is alive; the past and future are abstract, unreal. The mainstream notions of time in physics, meanwhile, are quite different. With one sole exception—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—all scientific laws operate independently of time. We appear to be living in a a four-dimensional “block universe” in which past and future are no different than left and right, up and down, in and out. Buonomano does a fine job in exploring why neuroscience and physics reach such different conclusions. Some threads are left inadequately explored—the movement towards a more statistically probable universe which the Second Law describes, for example, and possible explanations for the initial low entropy of the early universe. But writing about unanswered questions is difficult. One doesn’t know which paths future generations will judge to be dead ends and which lead to the ideas that unlock mysteries. Time is an undiscovered country, and Buonomano admirably guides us to the frontier. 8 ↑ ↓

Buonomano, Dean. Your Brain is a Time Machine: the Neuroscience and Physics of Time. WW Norton & Company, 2017. ISBN: 9780393247947.

Dune, Herbert (1965)

Dune is tragic. Not because of the death of beloved characters, but because the book never lives up to its considerable promise. Herbert sets up two captivating themes. The first is the possibility that humans could serve as a vector for life: the means by which life seeds itself into barren ground, takes root, and evolves into a self-sustaining system. The second is the war in the heart of the main character, the putative messiah Paul Atreides, between destiny and morality. It’s not so much that Herbert doesn’t develop these themes, but rather that he does so in predictable ways. The garden shall arise from the wasteland, okay: but need the Fremen hew so closely to romanticized natives connected to the web of life? Couldn’t we talk instead about whether planetary ecological interference is wise, even when driven by good intentions? And Paul need not become Lawrence of Arabia: what about the rage of powerful women treated as property? Herbert had a story he wanted to tell, and that’s fine. But parts of the novel are so psychologically astute, so entrancing in their blend of science and philosophy, that their unrealized potential always looms. 5 ↑ ↓

Herbert, Frank. Dune. Chilton Books, 1965. ISBN: 9780441172719.

The Treasures of Darkness, Jacobsen (1976)

Each of us is a library. Some of the information inside of us is genetic, the legacy of ancestors fighting to stay alive, of viruses embedding themselves inside our chromosomes; and some of that information is cultural, the traces of what long-dead people once thought, sung, wrote. The ancient Mesopotamians had a story about a great flood and an ark bearing the lucky few to safety. They had stories about a new race made of clay, treacherous serpents, doomed quests for eternal life, and the rise of the One God. The cultural beliefs that dominate modern life are remixes of ideas born before humans could write. Jacobsen clearly loves his subject, but the reader need not share that love in order to value what he’s done here. The names of the Sumerian and Akkadian gods are strange, their behavior often appalling, but they are, as much as any god in the world, our ancestors. Learning about their origins, their adaptations to the chaotic Fertile Crescent politics of the third and second millennium BCE, is like viewing a section of DNA through an electron microscope. We may not recognize what we see, and we won’t easily be able to connect that weird little molecule to this thing we think of as the self. But stare long enough, and the sheer improbability of what we’re looking at imposes itself upon us. Everything that came before is here now. 7 ↑ ↓

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. Yale University Press, 1976. ISBN: 9780225022919.

Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, Michael Schmidt (2019)

We consume books as if they were finished works. We imagine an author sifting through ideas, deciding what to exclude and emphasize, rearranging material to satisfy dramatic or pedagogical purposes, and then presenting to the world their best attempt at a coherent narrative. The reconstruction and translation of ancient works—especially fragmented texts written in now-dead languages—force us to question this vision. Schmidt’s curious little book is partly history of the discovery and interpretation of Gilgamesh, humanity’s first written story, and partly a meditation on the experience of reading. The oldest book in the world is still evolving. We know the present text is incomplete, with new fragments discovered every decade. Our comprehension of the language, culture, and history of ancient Sumer is likewise gradually improving. It’s curious that a four thousand year-old book is still changing, but the greater revelation is that every book is dynamic in this way. It interacts with our minds, our culture, our needs, and its meaning and relevance shift in every moment. That makes bottling its magic more difficult—and also calls into question the value of reviews like this one. We think about a book, we speak to others about what we’ve thought, but really the book is helping us think about ourselves, helping us describe ourselves to others. How strange and lovely that marks on a page, or a clay tablet, should have such staggering power. 7 ↑ ↓

Schmidt, Michael. Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem. Princeton University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780691195247.

Buddha, Karen Armstrong (2004)

Armstrong’s literary mission is to historicize religion. The exercise unavoidably exposes the arbitrariness of faith, but also invests religious ideas with the power that comes from knowing the hard road they’ve traveled, the battles, literal and figurative, that had to be won to assure their survival and spread. Armstrong’s previous works on the Abrahamic prophets and messiahs navigate this project admirably. With the Buddha, however, the task is impossible: accounts of his life are rare and most likely apocryphal, and even knowledge about the contemporaneous civilizations of the Gangetic plain is sparse. The reader can feel Armstrong straining to make the Buddha flesh and blood—the frequent reference to imputed thoughts and emotions, the too-heavy reliance on too few sources. Evaluating the accuracy of the sources themselves is difficult. We know a bit about the agendas of the Christian apostles; in contrast, we know almost nothing about what the compilers of the Pali Canon were trying to do, to whom they were responding. In the end, the book teaches us about Buddhist ideas but little about the historical Buddha, and we may never learn more. Maybe that’s okay; maybe how the Dharma fits into our time is clearer this way. And in the future, the Sangha will anyway be the Buddha, as Thich Nhat Hahn said. In truth, it always has been. Perhaps it’s time to grant old Gautama his well-deserved rest. 5 ↑ ↓

Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. Penguin, 2004. ISBN: 9780753813409.

My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knåusgard

Literary sensations feel inevitable in retrospect. My Struggle is an exception: a decade’s worth of reviews don’t convincingly explain its meteoric ascent to the top of millions of nightstands. Knåusgard is writing about undeniably banal events, and of course that’s the point: his days and thoughts are relatable, ordinary, and still somehow gripping. (Most of the time: I could have used less detail on housecleaning techniques). It’s fair to argue about whether the overall effect is “Proustian”—an adjective whose meaning seems to grow vaguer with every use—or self-indulgent. Your view could depend on whether your father was a jerk, how much your love of vodka worries you, or whether you’ve tried to write a novel while failing to be a good husband. Knåusgard writes elegantly and he’s made a case that his life and yours is worthy of artistic attention. Maybe that’s enough to give him his flowers without complaining too much. But what did we ignore while we paid attention to Karl Ove’s struggle? 5 ↑ ↓

Knåusgard, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book 1. , 2009. ISBN: 9780374534141.

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), Mack (2020)

The physics of the end of the universe is complicated and unresolved; to write an scientifically lucid book on the subject is an accomplishment. To also make the journey funny, rigorous, and even-handed towards warring schools of thought is more than we can hope for. Katie Mack has done all of that. The book is not perfect—DIALING BACK ON THE ALL CAPS WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE, and it may be useful to outlaw the word disorder in discussions of entropy—but complaints feel petty. Mack’s work will awaken a love of cosmology in thousands of young people, and that may be our greatest hope for unraveling the mysteries of the end of days. It may be too late (or not) for the rest of us to become practicing physicists, but we can let Mack’s words crack open our awareness of what the universe actually is, and thus who we are. The view—the sliver of a view—is astonishing. How strange that contemplating the death of reality could make one feel like every little thing is gonna be alright. 9 ↑ ↓

Mack, Katie. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). Scribner, 2020. ISBN: 9781982103552.

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Rachel Joyce (2016)

Love, too, is ordinary. Unless you’re the hardest-hearted of readers, Joyce’s novel has moments that will mist you up; but the overall effort feels artificial, designed to evoke emotion without having done the hard work of asking why these characters do what they do, why they are who they are. We can all relate to unrequited love, but that’s just the problem. The feeling is utterly mundane, and pathetically melodramatic, unless you convince the reader of the distinctiveness of either circumstance or character. I understand why Queenie Hennessy refuses to be a home-wrecker, but I don’t know why she doesn’t seek love elsewhere. She may have good reasons, but Joyce hasn’t put in the effort to give us confidence in her. Contrived plot devices—Sister Inconnue, a happy hospice family—try to fill the gap. I closed the book, sighed at Queenie’s fate, and felt rather manipulated. 2 ↑ ↓

Joyce, Rachel. The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Random House, 2016. ISBN: 9780812996678.

Escape from Evil, Becker (1975)

Becker’s far more famous Denial of Death is dated, to put it mildly. Casual sexism and homophobia blare throughout, and the gospel of psychoanalysis merits repeated eye rolling. I was thus surprised to be captivated by much of Escape from Evil, a posthumous work published by his daughter (against Becker’s explicit wishes). Becker is clearer and more succinct here. Psychoanalytic babble lingers, but is overshadowed by the overall bold thesis: people and tribes hurt others, sometimes on a genocidal scale, because we want desperately to make the world coherent, to be heroes in an unambiguous morality tale. We commit evil because we want so much to be good, and others suffer because we’re not aware of how arbitrary and self-manufactured our parameters of goodness are. This is not as despairing of a conclusion as it first seems. As Becker notes, better that evil should arise from fear and confusion than an unchangeable organismal nature (although a stronger discussion of evolution would have been welcome). His passages on the flaws of both leftist and rightist ideology, especially, are a salve for our times. There’s a common humanity underneath the rancor after all—not a pretty humanity, but one that we can work with. 7 ↑ ↓

Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. Free Press, 1975. ISBN: 9780029024508.

Frankenstein, Shelley (1818)

The writing is sometimes magnificent, other times grandiloquent; the plot is sometimes clever and subtle, other times ludicrous. (Is it not obvious to the good doctor that the “daemon” would hunt his family? Is the sole fact of ugliness enough to inspire such overwhelming rejection?). Shelley’s work is at this point far above all criticism and praise; its influence over the last two centuries is the only argument needed for its quality. But there is still much here, good and bad, worth reading and thinking about again. Shelley has written, through a strangely contrary emphasis on rejection, a love letter to life. Despite how hateful the world is, and despite the hate he has for himself, the modern Prometheus must keep living—and maybe that’s why Shelley can’t show us the final scene. 6 ↑ ↓

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Penguin, 2003 [1818]. ISBN: 9780141439471.

Housekeeping, Robinson (1980)

Through melancholy we shall be made free. I’m not being cynical; I deeply admire Robinson’s gift for finding the unbearable sadness within each gram of the world. The sadness is not gratuitous. It’s a symptom of seeing things as transient and mysterious, their nature untouchable. Our parents are like this. We want so desperately to look inside their hearts, to understand the most monstrous and noble of their decisions, to make sense of their—and our—love. But we can’t. It’s not given to fragments to comprehend the whole. And yet that spiteful divine decision, which is the source of so much grief, is not the final word, or Word. Sorrow transfigures generation after generation, and one day the children will not need to be taught freedom. 8 ↑ ↓

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ISBN: 9780374173135.

Long for This World, Weiner (2010)

Ah, but for casting. Weiner’s voice is splendid; the reader feels in the company of a good-natured and helpfully skeptical guide. His topic, the modern study of aging, is enjoying a resurgence of scientific and public interest in recent decades, and well worth the book-length treatment. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers from Weiner’s choice of protagonist, the self-styled prophet of immortality, Aubrey de Grey. Focusing on de Grey is understandable. Rebellious, arrogant, hard-drinking, long-bearded, undeniably influential in the field: all great literary fodder. But prophets are terrible dinner guests, and a book like this is ultimately an extended conversation. Obsession is interesting for a few minutes. A no-shortcuts struggle against death, and the even longer road to acceptance of death, would have been interesting for much longer, maybe forever. 5 ↑ ↓

Weiner, Jonathan. Long for this World. Ecco, 2010. ISBN: 9780060765361.

The Living End, Brown (2007)

The first half of Living End is a collection of ruminations that don’t cohere. Other writers have done a better job in summarizing the historical pursuit of immortality. The second half more effectively communicates Brown’s expertise, the molecular biology of death. I admire his commitment to alleviating end-of-life suffering, but I’m discomfited by the animating spirit of the book, the compulsion to preserve the self at all costs. To his credit, Brown at least mentions the alternative: to critically examine the nature of the self and then ask if letting go is as tragic as it seems. Perhaps the answer, in other words, is already available. And perhaps such an answer heals not only the living end but the living middle and, most importantly, forces more of our attention back to the living beginning—our children. 4 ↑ ↓

Brown, Guy. The Living End: The New Sciences of Death, Ageing, and Immortality. Macmillan, 2007. ISBN: 9780230522578.

Clock Without Hands, McCullers (1961)

McCullers’ gift for narrative is as evident here as in any of her better-known works, but it’s too much to ask the reader to love a book without loving any of the characters. Or at least parts> of the characters. Everyone here is confused and pathetic; there is no honor anywhere. Clock Without Hands would be a tragedy if we cared more, and it would be satire if we cared less. Either is a good option, but to be stuck in the liminal space is disappointing, especially coming from a writer of such talent. 4 ↑ ↓

McCullers, Carson. Clock Without Hands. Houghton Mifflin, 1961. ISBN: 9780395929735.

The Warden, Trollope (1855)

The Warden is an underrated gem of 19th century Victorian literature. Charles Dickens—who cameos as “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in this book—designed characters to carry the author’s message. Trollope instead created bundles of desire and then followed the thread of their fallibility wherever it led. The book reads like the author himself doesn’t know what will happen next. This style and these priorities makes Trollope closer kin to Dostoevsky than to Dickens; and like his Russian contemporaries, Trollope loves his characters enough to dissect the nature of their hypocrisy. Seen in a certain light, much of human behavior is insincere, but we regularly forgive children for their make-believe. Is the cost of forgiving the adults too, including ourselves, bearable? 9 ↑ ↓

Trollope, Anthony. The Warden. Oxford University Press, 1998 [1855]. ISBN: 9780192834089.

Waiting for the Last Bus, Holloway (2018)

The former Bishop of Edinburgh is now a revolutionary against binaries. Waiting for the Last Bus is the most wistful manifesto you’ll ever read, but it’s a manifesto nonetheless, a powerful argument for the co-existence of faith and unbelief within the same heart. Holloway has led a remarkable life, and as he glances at the darkness beyond, his love for the world is stronger and more shameless than ever. The realization of what we’re leaving hurts, but, as promised, facing the truth can save us—save us far beyond any hope we’ve ever had of what it means to be saved. “…[I]f we could say it, we wouldn’t have to sing it,” Holloway writes. Sometimes the saying is the singing. 7 ↑ ↓

Holloway, Richard. Waiting for the Last Bus. Canongate, 2018. ISBN: 9781786890214.

An Introduction to Zen, Suzuki (1934)

Nearly a century after its publication, Suzuki’s text is unsurpassed not only as an introduction to Zen but also as a pithy summation of its deepest spirit. The sentences are just long enough; the forays into the dangerous land of concepts meet the reader halfway, a middle ground that’s intriguing but not tempting. Now we turn the page, now we gaze upward at our lover, now we breathe. 10 ↑ ↓

Suzuki, D.T. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Grove Press, 1991 [1932]. ISBN: 9780802340556.

The Order of Time, Rovelli (2018)

Of all the laws of physics, only the Second Law of Thermodynamics distinguishes between past and future. It’s not even clear that time exists. It may be, like the world itself, nothing more than a echo of our own questions. Yet human lives are ruled by our inescapable awareness of the passage of time. Because we feel time, we fear death and grieve over the passing of others; we burn with urgency and regret. Rovelli covers all this ground with considerable grace and patience. He doesn’t escape poetic temptations—the lines between confirmed science and speculation sometime blur—but, overall, the book is infused with the deep humility that such a grand subject demands. 8 ↑ ↓

Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time. Riverhead Books, 2018. ISBN: 9780735216112.