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
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.
A modern-day Phileas Fogg circumnavigates the globe in books.
Damrosch, chair of the department of comparative literature at Harvard and founder of its Institute for World Literature, mimics Jules Verne’s ambitious itinerary of world travel from east to west as he delves into 16 geographical groups of five books “that have responded to times of crises and deep memories of trauma,” navigating “our world’s turbulent water with the aid of literature’s map of imaginary times and places.” As he moves along, delving into plots, characters, and themes, and both prose and poetry, over centuries, he creates a vast, fascinating latticework of books within books. He begins in London, with “one of the most local of novels” and “one of the most worldly books ever written,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which depicts a city that “bears more than a passing reference to Conrad’s heart of darkness.” Paris and Krakow are followed by “Venice–Florence,” with the old (Marco Polo, Dante, and Boccaccio) and the modern, Italo Calvino’s “magical, unclassifiable” Invisible Cities. Just like Damrosch’s own book, Calvino’s work views “the modern world through multiple lenses of worlds elsewhere.” Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is “a vibrant hybrid that re-creates a vanished Ottoman past for present purposes,” while Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies “portrays life in a fully globalized Oman.” Traveling along at a brisk pace, Damrosch takes us to the Congo, Israel/Palestine, Calcutta and “Shanghai–Beijing,” before arriving in Tokyo, where he examines Japan’s “greatest, and strangest” writer, Yukio Mishima, and the “incommensurability of ancient and modern eras, Asian and European traditions, that fuels” his work. Brazil is home to one of the “most worldly of local writers,” Clarice Lispector, whose “remarkable short story collection,” Family Ties, the author admires. In Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, Damrosch fondly revisits a book he enjoyed as a child. Other writers serving as stops on his international tour include Joyce, Atwood, Voltaire, Rushdie, and Soyinka.
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29988-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The surprisingly complex and lively memoir of a successful and influential horse trainer who helped pioneer nonviolent methods of breaking horses in. Some of the book's vigor and pace may have to do with the fact that Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face, 1994) is the coauthor. The narrative begins in 1948 when Roberts, then 13, spent time studying wild horses in the Nevada desert. He applied what he learned there to radically new ideas about how wild horses could be trained and came to be an important figure in horse racing circles. His portrait of the business of breeding and training horses is frank and fascinating, but the book's most memorable passages cover the rodeos and horse business in the west as it was in the author's youth, and include a haunting portrait of his violent, racist father and of some of the other remarkable figures Roberts knew (including a young James Dean). Over and above everything, though, is Roberts's surpassing love for horses, captured here in his evocations of the horses he has trained over a career spanning four decades. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45658-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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