Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning—and brought him to the edge of madness.
Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics at Columbia. Chloe’s daughter Phoebe grows up to become a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the sort of domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected.
Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science. At the origin of Western philosophy stands Plato, who got about as much wrong as one would expect from a thinker who lived 2,400 years ago. But Plato’s role in shaping philosophy was pivotal. On her way to considering the place of philosophy in our ongoing intellectual life, Goldstein tells a new story of its origin, re-envisioning the extraordinary culture that produced the man who produced philosophy. But it is primarily the fate of philosophy that concerns her. Is the discipline no more than a way of biding our time until the scientists arrive on the scene? Have they already arrived? Does philosophy itself ever make progress? And if it does, why is so ancient a figure as Plato of any continuing relevance?
Plato at the Googleplex is Goldstein’s startling investigation of these conundra. She interweaves her narrative with Plato’s own choice for bringing ideas to life—the dialogue. Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news program who denies there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a tiger mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato’s brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowd-sourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher’s depth and a novelist’s imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world.
A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion—of the body and of the mind—Properties of Light is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father's protege. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the "real world" and of the nature of time. The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. Insights into quantum mechanics and relativity theory are attached to the nerve fibers of human emotions, and these connections are alive with poignancy and pathos. For these characters, the passion to know and understand, like the desire for love, is full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for heartbreak as well as for ecstasy. The true subject of Properties of Light is the ecstatic response to reality, perhaps the only response that can embrace the erotic and the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. Written with, and about, a rare form of passion, this incandescent novel is fiction at its most daring and utterly original.
As you might expect from a writer trained as a philosopher, Rebecca Goldstein turns the full force of her dazzling energy and intelligence to this, her first collection of stories. These are stories that carry the weight and complexity of novels, whose characters are so beautifully developed that they come to haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. Only Rebecca Goldstein could give us a heroine who studies the mathematics of soap bubbles—and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. And only Rebecca Goldstein could depict with unswerving accuracy a group of Olympian intellects made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow in a French sky. These are just some of the marvelous, magical, and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors—a collection of stories that reveals the deep, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives. Goldstein is both an immensely gifted writer and erudite philosopher, and her characters think as intensely as they feel. Out of the interaction of thought and feeling, mind and heart, come these seven ambitious and splendidly witty explorations of the labyrinths of consciousness, the fragile mysteries of love, and the forces that—like the mathematical notion of "strange attractors"—bring a secret order to the chaotic randomness of life.
The story of the relationship between two sisters—Hedda, an intelligent writer of angry feminist novels, and Stella, a woman who has married and divorced several times. Within the novel is Hedda's own novel-in-progress of two Victorian sisters: one is a gifted astronomer; both are spinsters; and both may be on the verge of madness. A compelling blend of overlapping stories and unsettling dualities, The Dark Sister is a curious mixture of Victorian repressiveness regarding sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor.
A witty and intoxicating novel of ideas that plunges into the great debate between faith and reason. At the center is Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. Dubbed “the atheist with a soul,” he wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum—“the goddess of game theory.” But he is haunted by reminders of two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, 36 Arguments explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety.
In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.
In her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein bridged the gap between the comedy of manners and the novel of ideas with a deftness that suggested an American Iris Murdoch. In The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, Goldstein accomplishes an even more impressive feat of architecture, interlacing high romance with an elegant meditation on the conflicting claims of reason and desire. When the ethereal Eva Mueller, a professor of Plato and Spinoza at a small college, undertakes the philosophical education of Michael Fields, who is handsome, clever, and only twenty, she suddenly finds herself in an emotional whirlpool—and in the process discovers the terrifying extremes that unbridled passion and inhuman intellect have led her to in her past.
“I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.”
So begins The Mind-Body Problem, a trenchant, funny, very wise novel about life and love in academia—and the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit in the lives of all of us—that adds up to one of the most delicious and thought-provoking new reading experiences in a long time. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected. The story of her quest for a solution to the mind-body problem, a quest that involves the prickly contemporary dilemmas of sex and love, of doubt and belief, is a hilarious, touching, and always engrossing adventure. Rebecca Goldstein has written a delightfully entertaining and resonant book—a prodigious debut by an original and exciting writer.
