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
A scrupulously honest and consistently thoughtful love letter to “the most intense form of reading…there is.”
The acclaimed author and translator offers thoughts on the latter art and craft.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction in English, Lahiri moved to Rome in 2012 to immerse herself in Italian. Since then, she has published both a memoir and fiction in Italian and translated several works from Italian to English. This volume collects several pieces written over the past seven years—her translators’ notes to the novels Ties (2017), Trick (2018), and Trust (2021) by Italian writer (and friend) Domenico Starnone; stand-alone essays; and lectures and addresses—as well as an original introduction and afterword. A few themes emerge: Lahiri frequently returns to Ovid and Metamorphoses, most notably in her lecture “In Praise of Echo” and her moving afterword, which recounts her process of translating Ovid as her mother declined and died; metaphors of immigration and migration—Lahiri is both the daughter of Bengali-speaking Indian immigrants and an immigrant herself, twice over—ground other musings. Possibly the most provocative piece is “Where I Find Myself”—on the process of translating her own novel Dove mi trovo, from the original Italian into English as Whereabouts (2021)—an essay that finds her first questioning the ethics of self-translation (probed with a surgical metaphor) and then impelled to make revisions for a second Italian edition. The weakest essay is “Traduzione (stra)ordinaria / (Extra)ordinary Translation,” an appreciation of Italian revolutionary and thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose Letters From Prison reveal a linguist as ferociously compelled to investigate the process of translation as Lahiri herself. Composed originally as remarks for a panel, it reads like an elegantly annotated list of bullet points that will have readers wishing Lahiri had revised it into a cohesive essay. Readers may also find themselves envious of the author’s students of translation at Princeton, but this sharp collection will have to do. Two essays originally composed in Italian are printed in the original in an appendix.
A scrupulously honest and consistently thoughtful love letter to “the most intense form of reading…there is.”Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-23116-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.
Sedaris remains stubbornly irreverent even in the face of pandemic lockdowns and social upheaval.
In his previous collection of original essays, Calypso (2018), the author was unusually downbeat, fixated on aging and the deaths of his mother and sister. There’s bad news in this book, too—most notably, the death of his problematic and seemingly indestructible father at 96—but Sedaris generally carries himself more lightly. On a trip to a gun range, he’s puzzled by boxer shorts with a holster feature, which he wishes were called “gunderpants.” He plays along with nursing-home staffers who, hearing a funnyman named David is on the premises, think he’s Dave Chappelle. He’s bemused by his sister Amy’s landing a new apartment to escape her territorial pet rabbit. On tour, he collects sheaves of off-color jokes and tales of sexual self-gratification gone wrong. His relationship with his partner, Hugh, remains contentious, but it’s mellowing. (“After thirty years, sleeping is the new having sex.”) Even more serious stuff rolls off him. Of Covid-19, he writes that “more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them.” The author’s support of Black Lives Matter is tempered by his interest in the earnest conscientiousness of organizers ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated. (He refers to one such person as a “snacktivist.”) Such impolitic material, though, puts serious essays in sharper, more powerful relief. He recalls fending off the flirtations of a 12-year-old boy in France, frustrated by the language barrier and other factors that kept him from supporting a young gay man. His father’s death unlocks a crushing piece about dad’s inappropriate, sexualizing treatment of his children. For years—chronicled in many books—Sedaris labored to elude his father’s criticism. Even in death, though, it proves hard to escape or laugh off.
A sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-39245-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
