Mack's pleasing writing style makes speculating about the death of the universe unexpectedly entertaining.
A theoretical astrophysicist surveys five possible scenarios for the end of the universe, backed by the latest research in physics and cosmology.
Acknowledging the end of the universe is a grim proposition. But after accepting the fact that our universe cannot “persist unchanged, forever,” thinking through the science of end times is actually a thrill, an opportunity “to dig deep into the question of where it’s all going, what that all means, and what we can learn about the universe we live in by asking these questions.” Mack uses humor, metaphor, and personal experience to offset her often technical descriptions, creating a delightfully unsettling narrative that explains big ideas in modern physics and cosmology through the lens of end times. “Whether or not the world is falling apart from a political perspective,” she writes, “scientifically, we’re living in a golden age. In physics, recent discoveries and new technological and theoretical tools are allowing us to make leaps that were previously impossible…the scientific exploration of how the universe might end is just now undergoing its renaissance.” In accessible yet precise language, Mack details how these modern scientific approaches suggest five apocalyptic scenarios: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, and the Bounce. Each is creative in its demise, giving the author an excuse to expound on the latest theories about dark energy and the expanding universe, the Higgs boson, and the multiverse. She celebrates that the near future will be filled with knowledge and discovery, even if the far future is doomed. “Work on the cutting edge of physics is already pointing us toward a universe far stranger than we even could have imagined,” she writes. Drawing on the wisdom of a variety of pioneering physicists, the author delivers a sleek narrative of discovery.
Mack's pleasing writing style makes speculating about the death of the universe unexpectedly entertaining. (b/w illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0354-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
There’s something for everyone in this sumptuous collection.
The esteemed anthologist and Columbia professor compiles another vast array of American essays.
“What makes this period so interesting,” writes Lopate, “is the mélange of clashing generations and points of view” as well as the rise of the personal essay. This period opened the door to a range of diverse, powerful voices, many of which have been underrepresented in many anthologies of the 20th century. Lopate begins with a piece by Hilton Als, who creates a lovely autobiographical portrait of actor Louise Brooks, written from her point of view: “I was asked to perform with the Ziegfeld Follies; I was the most hated Follies girl, ever (too well-read, too much attitude); I was loved then and only then by several lesbians of intellectual distinction and many fairy boys who drank and wrote.” Next is Nicholson Baker’s reflective series of vignettes, “One Summer,” in which every paragraph begins with those two words. Anne Carson’s somber “Decreation” delves into the lives of three women who “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring” while Terry Castle’s lighthearted, confessional “Home Alone” explores her vice for alluring interior decorating magazines. Sloane Crosley’s witty “The Doctor Is a Woman,” describes the process of freezing her 67 remaining eggs, “a gaudy amount of eggs for a human to produce….I am not a woman—I am a fish.” In “Matricide,” Meghan Daum writes affectingly about her mother’s passing, and death appears again in poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch’s comforting “Bodies in Motion and at Rest.” Sleight-of-hand modernism scatters about in Ander Monson’s “Failure: A Meditation, Another Iteration (With Interruptions).” Lopate makes an appearance in “Experience Necessary,” responding to an essay by Montaigne. As in previous volumes, the list of contributors is enviable: Patricia Hempl, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris, Alexander Chee, Eula Biss, Margo Jefferson, Yiyun Li, Darryl Pinckney, Rebecca Solnit, etc….
There’s something for everyone in this sumptuous collection.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-56732-5
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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A thorough, occasionally unwieldy look inside the mind of a modernist titan; essential reading for Kafka scholars.
A fresh, unadulterated translation of Kafka’s notebooks, dense with introspection and writerly despair.
Until now, the diaries of the iconic Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) were only available in English via an edition edited by his literary executor, Max Brod, who famously denied Kafka’s deathbed request that his writings be destroyed. Though Brod salvaged Kafka’s writing, he also took a heavy hand to the diaries, suppressing homoerotic passages and overly streamlining Kafka’s prose in places. Benjamin’s new translation is based on an unexpurgated German critical edition published in 1990, and it provides a clearer glimpse into Kafka’s process. Starting in 1910, Kafka began writing observations about readings, plays, cabaret performances, and, occasionally, brothels in Prague, chronicling trips around Europe and drafting essays and stories, often reworking and expanding them repeatedly. He also discusses his publications, frustrations with his job and family, and various romantic courtships. But the attraction of Kafka’s diaries has always been his coruscating descriptions of his existential struggles as a writer and human being. He captures his frustration in ways that are wrenching, vivid, and highly quotable: “Some new insights into the creature of unhappiness that I am have consolingly dawned on me”; “the pleasure again in imagining a knife twisted in my heart”; “the story came out of me like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime.” In light of his labor to gain attention during his lifetime—true fame would only arrive after his death—such passages are especially piercing. Still, the new edition isn’t always user-friendly for casual readers, studded with hundreds of footnotes and asking readers to bounce back to an earlier notebook to read the conclusion of a story draft begun in a later one.
A thorough, occasionally unwieldy look inside the mind of a modernist titan; essential reading for Kafka scholars.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4355-0
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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