A sensitive drama about an aged scientist in an anti-intellectual era.
Piatigorsky (The Speed of Dark, 2018, etc.) offers a speculative novel about a researcher undertaking a pure-knowledge scientific study in an era of hostility to free inquiry.
Financial collapse in the near future has left the United States with a huge unemployment rate, new diseases appearing and old scourges returning, more conservatives in Congress, and a rabble-rousing Washington, D.C., reporter slamming taxpayer spending on any research that doesn’t promise immediate, practical payoff. In the 2040s, researcher Ricardo Sztein is an aged, respected fixture at the Vision Science Center who is shaken after his wife’s cancer death. He embraces his other great love—science experimentation just for the sake of knowledge, not a dictated agenda or financial return. His curiosity about how jellyfish see with multiple eyes (“rhopalia”) of unexpected complexity sends him to the swamps of Puerto Rico, supported by like-minded colleagues and a loan of NASA computer tech. Clues uncovered in his field lab hint at new revelations about animal perception and evolutionary biology. But when his rambles become publicly known, grandstanding politicians and media condemn him, cuing a public tribunal that’s reminiscent of that in the film Inherit the Wind. Piatigorsky is a scientist and essayist, so he knows of what he speaks regarding the cloistered realm of modern inquiry and exploration, which includes people jockeying for grants with ambition masked by professional etiquette. He also expresses scientists’ angst that average citizens appreciate nothing about basic research and could pull the plug on it at any moment. The future that the author evokes in this high-minded, speculative drama is thinly sketched, but what readers do glean about it is unpleasant, indeed. The jellyfish material, meanwhile, seems fanciful, but it’s firmly based in fact; the author includes photographic illustrations here that shore up the science. However, his book never aspires to Michael Crichton–like dimensions, so readers expecting a mind-blower like Carl Sagan’s 1985 blockbuster Contactshould dial down their expectations. Still, it’s an intelligent, wistful rumination on the value of scientific pursuit, the joy of discovery, and the loneliness of a maverick thinker.
A sensitive drama about an aged scientist in an anti-intellectual era.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9965481-0-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: IPBooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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