Review: Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest

Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest, 1974 — Imagine an alternate universe in which every word written by William Shakespeare was the literal, historical truth. Since that, in turn, would imply the existence of clocks capable of chiming the hour in Julius Caesar’s...

Review: Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh

Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, 2005 — A work studded with extraordinary and unsettling insights: Christianity an usurpation rather than excrescence of Judaism? The New Testament as deliberate misreading of the Hebrew Bible? In this slim, dense...

Review: Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?

Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, 2012 — One chill Paris night shortly before the turn of the millennium, Jim Holt stood on the Ponts des Arts smoking, looking down at the Seine, and pondering Leibniz’s old question “Why...

Review: Hawking’s A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1998 — This book puts me in mind of the story about how a Harvard number theorist, through some malfunction of the scheduling computer, got assigned to teach an introductory course in pre-calculus. Being one of those...

Review: Helprin’s Winter’s Tale

  Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale, 1983 — Mark Helprin once wrote a short story about a young diplomat posted to Great Britain in World War II and assigned to assuage the plight of refugees in that conflict. After one of many long days at this thankless task, he...

Review: Herbert’s Whipping Star

Frank Herbert, Whipping Star, 1969 — To spell it out right up front, Frank Herbert’s sf novel Whipping Star is based on a very, very, very silly premise. At the risk of repeating myself, did I mention that the premise is silly? Well, it is. Here’s a partial synopsis —...