When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut starts as the best Wikipedia entry you ever read, circling and linking, and as a reader you are compelled to just keep going. Then abruptly the pace slows, because the science is getting more entangled and quirky, just as the lives of those involved seem to defy linear narrative. By the end, the reader finds that everything, facts, emotions, biography, science, gets all mashed up. A book that probably rewards several close readings. If you imagined Borges being paid to write non-fiction for The New Yorker with John McPhee as his editor-colleague, this is definitely right up that alley.

About mkevane

Economist at Santa Clara University and Director of Friends of African Village Libraries.
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