Book Review-Einstein's Dream by Alan Lightman

This is a fine little book; a famous little book; and a clever little book.

I came upon this book late, even though I had heard of the book before, but I didn’t pay enough heed to the hype to start reading earlier.

This book is a neat exercise in thought experimentation by a physicist. He is having a little fun as well as showing off his physics chops.

Even though I knew what Lightman is trying to do, I was surprised slightly when he jumped straight into the tales of relativity. The stories were, at first, seemingly unrelated to one another, it isn’t until a little further up the road that the theme of the stories established themselves. Thus begins a short but charming ride through the theory of relativity as illustrated through vignettes starring the citizenry of the good people of Bern. The story moves along with dates serving as names of the chapters and Lightman weaving the sequence of tales as he uses the stories to explain the physics.

The book is structured so that there is no structure. It is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s books. The stories come at you in short quick bursts with seemingly no connection between them, but in the end there is an overriding theme to it all.

The beauty of the book is that you can enjoy the gentle tales and be charmed by the oddities built within the stories or you can add another dimension to the tales by actually understanding the specifics of the theory of relativity and drawing the parallels between the stories and the relativity. I had an inkling about the physics, having been exposed to it during my undergrad days but I am obviously not an expert in the dark arts of theoretical physics, yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book beyond just the charming stories.

Book Review-Between The World and Me -By Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a famous book, a book that made the NYT best seller’s list. It is a book that I am supposed to like because reading it should show the world that I am racially sensitive and I am a good little liberal. Having read this book has become a badge of honor for all left leaning intellectuals in the United States.

When you have expectations like that, you tend to approach the book with a jaundiced eye. You feel a bit defensive about liking the book. You feel like you are obligated to read this book because it adds to your credentials.

Fact is, I loved this book. For many reasons and at different levels and the book touched me in different ways.

On a very basic level, I love the flow of the book; it is actually an extended essay, stretching over 152 pages. It is no wonder that the author is such a celebrated writer. The man can write. More importantly, he has a very blunt voice, one that is backed up with writing skills and an ability to think critically and an original thought process and a unique point of view. This serves to make his voice salient and outstanding.

The essay is a letter to his teenage son. It is at once a personal essay, an oral history of his own experience as a black young man in a white America. It is a warning and a detailed instruction book about how America expects its black young men to react and how these expectations will act on the mind of the black young men in America. But to call it as just a warning is also to de-mean its importance to our society.

This is the author’s extended conversation with all of us, his black compatriots; the white society which has shaped his life, intellect, and emotions; and not the least of which, his son. He goes into a long discourse on what it is to be a black man in America. He accomplishes his goal by putting his own experience out there for all to examine, he exposes his deepest feelings and thoughts to the readers, an act of true courage. He make his points, he defends his points, he weaves a story of the hard earned knowledge he learned at his father’s feet, as well as on the streets of Baltimore. He lays out the lessons he learned while growing up as a young black man, going from child to a grown man with a family and working as a journalist.

The narrative is raw, personal, and hard to hear. I have had to stop reading at certain points of the narrative because it is too emotionally draining and intellectually challenging. I have had to stop and think about what is said. When I mentioned this to a friend, she, a black woman, said:” I have internalized it.”, i.e. the emotional upheavals and feelings dredged up by the author are part and parcel the American experience for my friend. And that revelation is yet another point of pause for me.

As I approached the end of the narrative, I was both happy that the emotional roller coaster was coming to an end, but at the same time I was sad to have to cease reading the words of a craftsman and a thoughtful, deeply intelligent philosopher.

This book takes a lot of thought and reflection. This is a serious and important history of the American experience, it elicits ideas and reflections that aren’t usually on the surface, and that is a good thing.

I believe this book is as important as the mass media reports, It is in fact, much more important.