Book Review: When Will There Be Good News

I bought this book when it came out. It came highly recommended and with a lot of splashy reviews. I had a hard time getting into the story, especially with the way the story started. It was very disconcerting.

I picked it up and put it down a number of times in the interim. This year I decided that I must persevere at least up until the half way mark; I am happy that I persevered, for this is a remarkable book, even though it is gloomy and dark. 

A professor once said that a good mystery starts with the murder weapon introduced on the first page, and the murder is solved on the last with the weapon prominently featured. While not following the edict exactly, Kate Atkinson does marvelous work entering tidbits of facts, clues and descriptions that makes very little sense initially but as the story gets rolling along, the tidbits begin to fit together in a coherent manner. She has a masterful way of describing and observing the people’s surroundings with their inner voice, their personality. Her eye for detail and words make those scenes, even when it is a head fake, extremely interesting to read.

The characters are well thought out and well developed; you see them as others see them as well as how they see themselves. Not all of them are sympathetic obviously, but the reader does hang their words as the story develops. They are all flawed in their own way, they have all been damaged in their own way, which is what makes for the tapestry of the plot so intriguing and enthralling. Atkinson is the weaver of multiple complex threads to create this tapestry. Even when she telegraphs the plot twist, I didn’t mind much as I was engrossed in the telling.

Without giving away the plot, the story involves the survivor of a long ago senseless crime, a young orphan girl, and a couple of police detectives, one former and one present, their entanglements, past and present. The resolution of the full story was complete without seeming fanciful, except for a couple of the storylines felt rushed at the end, as resolutions are wont to be.

A bonus for me is that part of the story takes place in Scotland, one of my favored locales. While the comparison to the Tartan Noir School could be loosely drawn, I would place this novel on its own because it is so uniquely told.

I am now a Kate Atkinson fan. More books to buy.

Book Review: Why? What Makes Us Curious-Mario Mivio

Mario Livio is a very well-known polymath, an astrophysicist as well as an author known for writing books on different math and physics related topics. I had read about this particular book on the New York Times, the idea of exploring curiosity excited me immensely. A systematic look at why we are curious and what the sciences tell us about our curiosity was a very seductive topic indeed.

In the end, the final couple of chapters really redeemed the book, as for the rest of the book, I cannot really put a finger on why the material failed to engage my….curiosity, but it did not.

This is a thin book, not really an academic tome on the science and history of curiosity, yet it retains that flavor throughout. Dr. Livio is a good writer, and undertook a very logical and systematic approach to telling the story, I expected no less from and eminent astrophysicist.

The first chapter examines the very human trait of being curious. He very nicely and in the fine story telling fashion of these kind of books to lay out the ground work for examining what curiosity is and what curiosity means to him personally, as he is the primary investigator of this book.

Three chapters are about people, people who has exhibited the kind of intense curiosity that enticed Dr. Livio to examine the topic. Two chapters tells the story of two legendary polymaths from the past: Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. These were entertaining and knowledgeable chapters telling the stories of the intellectual prowess of two remarkable men. He makes the case that curiosity is what drove these men to the achievements that they have accomplished. While they are not complete biographies of these two giants of science and curiosity seekers, the two chapters fully drew my attention into the story. Much later, Dr. Livio interviewed living polymaths, people who exhibit the same kind of intense curiosity as Leonardo and Feynman. They are living in the modern world, and their stories are similarly engaging, although they are just a little less fascinating since they have yet to come to a complete picture of the result of their curiosity since their productive life is far from over.

A very scientifically satisfying and thorough examination of curiosity was undertaken through the usual process of reviewing and encapsulating the most recent research being done in the sciences. A substantial chapter was devoted to the anthropology of curiosity, two chapters were devoted to a competent review of what we know about curiosity from the psychological and neuroscience aspects of the topic. A chapter was devoted to the human love of curiosity, a historical look at our civilization and how curiosity drives us into achieving what we have achieved as a civilization. In the end two chapters were devoted to asking the question Why Curiosity and an epilogue which nicely summarizes the book.

I liked the organization, I liked the approach, and it should have been quite an easy sell to me, but it was challenging for me to completely engage in the stories and studies.  I would postulate that Dr. Livio made his case in a pretty clinical way. The psychological studies, as well as the neuroscience chapters were kind of a slog because I was not familiar with those areas and I was struggling with some of the conclusions and arguments. I am not sure if doing more with what he had or whether doing less with what he had would have helped. I think I still would have had a challenging time. Perhaps in skimming over the book after some time had passed would do the trick.

Indeed, I am very glad that this book was written and at least this was placed in the popular literature for the sake of posterity. I believe that it is a capable and informative book on the subject of curiosity, which made me curious and being curious, which after all is what the purpose of the book is supposed to be.