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Paris to the moon
A book about Paris and France and what it means to move to a city with your family so unfamiliar at the start.
This a collection of essays about his time in Paris written for the New Yorker magazine. There is no need to read in sequence in fact I found myself reading pages, then moving forward reading another, then going back.
It is about how writing can be both elegant and informative, a rarity one seldom finds. Each essay is like a small bite in a complex meal, adding to the first and in the end a destination unexpected. It is a book that is part travel, part culture and mostly about what it means to be alive.
Helgoland
The author is a scientist and a physicist describing how the quantum world was discovered and defined.
Helgoland is a small island in the North Sea where the young scientist Werner Heisenberg found this strange world of the small and the mathematics that describe it all.
Rovelli does not immerse the reader in the polytechnics of the mathematics but rather in the ideas and how they came to be and how very unlike this world is to the world we as average people live in.
We often think that the world is clear and bright in front us, but as we sometimes discover on our concept of the world nothing is further from the truth. The world of the small is so much bigger than we could have imagined with so many mysteries still to be solved and so much that is much more delightful than we could have dreamed.
The book starts with a velocity that mimics how those first making these discoveries must have felt and you are driven along this swift current together to the end. Those who are not scientific will still find this a most compelling book and his language is often so descriptive that you stop and set the book down just to pause and experience what he has just described.
A short book that can be ready quickly or a short book that unfolds more and more each time you read. Some books go boom and some it is the long echo we recall. This is a book with a long echo.
Review by Horace Steadfast
Print Publication Emeritus