Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Sally Rooney’s central charterers in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, talk quite a bit, just about every time they interact, hashing and rehashing…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness by Leslie Valiant
Princeton Review by Walter Cummins As I read the explanatory chapters of Leslie Valiant’s The Importance of Being Educable—winner of the Turing Award, I found myself quibbling with him about…
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins Kate Atkinson’s title for her sixth Jackson Brodie detective novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook, offers a broad hint that she is about…
Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes
Johns Hopkins Review by Walter Cummins Kathryn Hughes appears to have taken great pleasure in writing Catland, bouncing back and forth between considering the life of Louis Wain, an artist…
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age To AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Random House Review by Walter Cummins It turns out that Yuval Noah Harari, in Nexus, his latest book, isn’t a complete fatalist. But one has to read to the end…
The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country by Rosie Schaap
Mariner Review by Walter Cummins My own attempt at a geographic cure many years ago ended up as foolhardy, which is the common result for most who try. Canadian psychologist…
What Is It Like to Be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer
Eastover Review by Walter Cummins Despite the seeming implication of Chris Arthur’s title of this, his tenth essay collection, he is not seeking an existential generalization about an abstract ontological…
Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins Before I attempt to say something about a book that theorizes life’s emergence from the perspective of the science of physics, I should admit that…
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction…