A wonderful little book, cartoonlike, yes, but tender and impassioned—and with a tour of math just as useful for YAs as for...
A bestseller in France (where the author teaches history of science), Guedj’s first fiction is a charmer indeed—a history of mathematics offered up pretty as you please via a handful of likable characters, a mystery—and a talking parrot.
At 84 and wheelchair-bound, though nimble in every other way, the kindly Mr. Ruche owns a bookshop in Montmartre, where he lives celibately with Perrette, 44 years his junior, and her three children, the twins Jonathan and Lea and adoptive 12-year-old Max, who is deaf. This is the little family that pulls together with bonds of friendship and love when two things happen: Max saves a parrot from two thugs at a flea market, and Mr. Ruche receives the best private collection of math books in the world, sent from South America by his old college friend Elgar Grosrouvre. Grosrouvre is also 84 but, unlike Mr. Ruche, is facing a catastrophe. For years, he’s devoted himself to math, and now he’s proved not only Fermat’s Last Theorem but also Goldbach’s conjecture. Equally astonishing, he hasn’t published: instead, he’s confided his breakthrough work only to “a loyal friend,” partly to keep the theorems from an unnamed enemy—who, next thing Mr. Ruche hears, has apparently burned down Grosrouvre’s house and the old man with it. How to find out who it was? What to do? Oblique clues in Grosrouvre’s books and letters suggest a trail of meaning, but to make sense of them would mean studying mathematics from Pythagoras on through Fermat—which is just what the little family does, offering readers, howsoever math-impaired they be, a great introductory ride all the way from Thales measuring the Pyramids through the discovery of zero and Archimedes repelling the Romans at Syracuse. Will the mystery be solved? Well, you won’t find out about it here.
A wonderful little book, cartoonlike, yes, but tender and impassioned—and with a tour of math just as useful for YAs as for Methuselah.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28055-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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