An entertaining meta-philosophical romp in which great minds mull over life’s deepest questions.
Navarro offers a fantasy in which famed philosopher Kurt Gödel seeks answers in the afterlife.
The narrative focuses on the “brilliant, eccentric, unsettlingly precise” Gödel, a figure whom the author, in an introduction, compares to Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin and describes as not only a mathematician, but also a “philosopher of mystery” who found new puzzles in settled certainties. “In any system that’s powerful enough to talk about arithmetic,” Navarro writes, “there will always be true statements that the system can never prove.” As a way to pursue these questions further, the author imagines Gödel journeying to a series of afterworld locations to have conversations with a wide variety of famous artists and thinkers from the past. Gödel talks with fellow philosophers, of course, but he also chats with such figures as painter Jackson Pollock (“‘Logic and paint,’ Pollock mused, ‘both dance around the unknown’”) and even Jesus, whom he asks about the incompleteness at the heart of mathematics: “If I left no room for doubt, then there would be no true faith,” Jesus tells him. “Faith must be chosen.” In each encounter, Gödel doggedly inquires about the nature of belief and certainty and looks into the possibility of quantifying morality and doubt. It’s a familiar but inspired storytelling device, and Navarro uses it skillfully, delicately navigating the dramatics of presenting each conversation and his indefatigable main character’s overarching philosophical quest. Socrates, for instance, asks the protagonist whether one can ever fully grasp truth, and readers are told that Gödel “had always admired [mathematician Blaise] Pascal’s mind, not only for his rigorous approach to mathematical truth but for his willingness to engage with the ineffable.” Philosophical discussion dominates the narrative; as a result, some historical figures end up sounding more alike than they likely would have in real life. This slight shortcoming is a result of the book’s pedagogical nature, but it never entirely blunts the fun.
An entertaining meta-philosophical romp in which great minds mull over life’s deepest questions.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798891389588
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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