A tantalizing, probing inquiry into the possibilities of alien life.
Have we been visited by aliens?
Harvard astronomer Loeb believes we have, basing his assertion on “evidence…collected over eleven days, starting on October 19, 2017,” at a Hawaiian observatory. That’s when the author, the director of the Black Hole Initiative and the Institute for Theory and Computation, and his fellow scientists unexpectedly observed the “first known interstellar visitor.” It was a small object: “highly luminous, oddly tumbling, with a 91 percent probability of being disk-shaped.” Moving roughly 58,900 miles per second, it “passed through our solar system and, without visible outgassing, smoothly accelerated from a path that deviated from the force of the sun’s gravity alone.” Loeb and his colleagues named it “Oumuamua,” a Hawaiian word that roughly translates to scout. Though the scientific debate continues, writes the author, “the likelihood of scientists ever observing demonstrable proof is very remote.” Loeb meticulously analyzes the evidence they have so far: No “confirmed interstellar object had ever been observed in our solar system,” and it wasn’t a comet or asteroid. Further research revealed that it rotated every eight hours and was approximately 100 yards long and less than 10 yards wide. Its unique, “smooth and steady” acceleration and deviation from the sun led the author to a hypothesis that charmed the media but generated “intense controversy and pushback” from other scientists. Loeb also delves into the object’s spin rate, unchanging rotation, and the possibility that it might be another civilization’s space hardware. After all, we’ve been “junking-up” space for years. Loeb issues a clarion call for a team of astro-archaeologists to increase research into possible alien life; unfortunately, the “conservative scientific community” has always fought against such research. It’s hard to argue with the author’s claim that it’s the “height of arrogance to contend that we are unique,” and he even speculates that life on Earth may be of Martian or interstellar origin.
A tantalizing, probing inquiry into the possibilities of alien life.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-27814-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.
A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author’s two teenage sons.
“I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.” So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives—one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a “livable life” was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, “which is my life,” marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, “Life…does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li’s book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. “Both my children chose a hard thing,” she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. “We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.”
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374617318
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.
The noted Australian author spirals through personal and collective history searching for connections between past and present, but often distrusting those that appear.
Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, finds the struggle to create a credible memoir troubling, since most autobiographical work must be constructed from “the lies we call time, history, reality, detail, facts.” In this distinctly nonlinear example of the form, the author pulls at threads connected to key, often traumatic events. One of these nodes is the years his father spent in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Flanagan notes that he almost certainly would have died of starvation were it not for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, leaving the author conflicted about the devastating loss suffered in Japan combined with the fact that he would never have existed without the catastrophe. He reaches back to tie the bomb to the life and work of H.G. Wells, who first conceived it in one of his lesser-known novels, and to Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who was captivated by Wells' novels and who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Another node is Flanagan’s shards of memory of his parents, including his mother's last words before her death at 95: “Thank you all for coming. I have had a lovely time.” A third key element of this fascinating work is Flanagan's prolonged near-death by drowning as a river guide when he was 21, to which he refers frequently throughout the book—and then at horrifying length in the final section. “Everything ever since,” he writes, “has been an astonishing dream….Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me.”
A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593802335
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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