“This is not a book about the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, nor, despite its importance in my life, is it about Antarctica. It is more about time and chance and the images and dreams we bring with us from childhood which shape who we are and what we become. It is about science and atoms and starry nights and what we think we remember, though we have made it up.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (DEC 18, 2011)

Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green is at once a travelogue and joyous celebration of science. The author is a chemist who has done significant research in the dry lakes of Antarctica. Boltzmann was a brilliant physicist and teacher, a pioneer in the study of entropy. He was an early champion for the atomic model of matter in the 19th century, to the derision of many of his peers. Ironically, he committed suicide at almost the same time as Einstein was doing his pioneering work on brownian motion. This work, unknown to Bolztmann, provided persuasive evidence for the atomic model by demonstrating the existence of tiny units of matter, so small they are invisible and yet energetic enough that they cause macroscopic dust particles to move randomly in water. The author notes that Boltzmann died in Duino, the same city where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies, brilliant poetry of profound melancholy. Boltzmann and Rilke were kindred spirits in the sense that both suffered profound depression, and were tortured by self-doubt. More importantly, the two shared the supreme gift of being able to take experience and use their respective media of mathematics and written language creatively to express unique truths.

This short work is not intended to do justice to the arduous task of skeptical inquiry and the continuing cycle of intellectual labor turning observation into theory, theory into prediction, prediction into experiment that supports or falsifies the theory. What this book does is illuminate the spark that drives scientists, and it makes clear that science comes from the work of real people who are so moved by the mystery and magic of their experience that they will walk through the fire of scorn, self-doubt and in the case of Galileo, the very real fear of torture, to seek and speak truth.

Boltzmann’s entropy formula S= k*log(W) is carved onto his tomb. His work on entropy describes the relationship between what one can observe such as the temperature of a volume of gas and a statistical description of the more or less random states of tiny units such as the motion of the constituent molecules. His work on entropy metaphorically focuses our attention on the role of chance in our every endeavor. Chance encounters with scientists during the author’s travels as a younger man lead to opportunities such as the chance to work in Antarctica. The capacity for poetic wonder at the splendors of nature fueled his scientific career. The message is that what comes to everyone does so more or less by happenstance, but some find mystery and beauty in these chance encounters. Creative souls, the scientists and poets, are then inspired for a lifetime of expression.

Boltzmann’s Tomb is a scientific travelogue celebrating a number of pilgrimages to the places where great science was made. As we follow the author on his travels, we visit the Vienna of Boltzmann and so many others in science and the arts. We spend time in Galileo’s Florence, hometown of the Renaissance. Cambridge was home to Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick of DNA fame. We visit Prague where Copernicus and Kepler created the basis for modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for Newton’s description of gravity. Along the way we see the scientists as human beings, creatures of their place and time and inspired to transcend their beginnings by creating glorious structures of thought to explain the mysteries of the universe. We come to appreciate the passionate and poetic wonder that informs much of great science. Do yourself a favor and put this book on your shelf of inspirational literature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Green
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Bibliography:

• Improbable Eden (2003)
• Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes (2008)
• Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science (June 2011)

“The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

“Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.”

See what I mean?

Tinkers picks up eight days before George Washington Crosby, a New England patriarch, expires. He is lying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” He is surrounded by the antique clocks he collected and repaired, each tick-tock a motion closer to oblivion. His family, like his consciousness, comes and goes. He built the house in which he now rests. “The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment the floor was going to give.” As he dies, the house and room dissolve, family members disappear. His fragile consciousness returns him to the hardscrabble existence of his upbringing in New England.

George’s father, Howard, was a tinker and traveling salesman. He plied his trade in the backwoods of Maine. He had a hard life. He was epileptic. Upon learning that his cold-hearted wife is going to have him institutionalized, he abandons his family, leaving George and his siblings. “His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and make him into something better.” The event–the abandonment–haunts and plagues George to his last breath. “…personal mysteries,” he thinks, “like where is my father, why can’t I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends.”

A good reviewer worth his or her salt, would not, should not, pad a review with so much lifting of prose, so many passages directly rendered. But I cannot help myself. The writing in this compact little book is so taut it hums like a drawn bowstring. The reader wonders, how such tension can so artfully be sustained? But sustained it remains, each paragraph more precisely constructed than the previous one.

Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. The publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, had only been in business a couple of years when they brought it to market. The New York Times did not review the book, it being so far off the radar. (“Every now and then a good book completely passes us by,” Gregory Cowles wrote in the Arts section, a full year after publication.) It won the Pulitzer. Deservedly so. At a time when a thinking person might despair over the crassness and commercialization of, well, of virtually everything that matters, one finds hope and its reward in the tale of such talent realized. Indeed, all is not lost.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 331 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Harding
EXTRAS:	Excerpt UWIRE interview with Paul Harding
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Pulitzer Prize winners: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (2009)
• Enon (September 2013)

“If I could have ceased what pendulums swung, or wheels turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAY 25, 2011)

World War I was the deadliest conflict in Western history, but contemporary portrayals of war in literature and cinema primarily focus on examples of combat from the past fifty or sixty years. At a time when the Great War is receding into the annals of distant history, this elegiac and edifying novel has been released–a small, slim but powerful story of a young soldier, Josef Vinich, who hails from a disenfranchised and impoverished family in rural Austria-Hungary.

Josef was born in the rural mining town of Pueblo, Colorado, in 1899, to immigrant parents from Austria-Hungary who dreamed of a better life in the United States. The opening eleven-page prologue, a stunning and deeply felt family tragedy, is subsequently followed by a move back to the Empire, to his father’s village of Pastvina (which is now part of the Czech Republic). Josef’s father then marries a cruel woman with two young sons. They live the hardscrabble existence of shepherds, barely able to put food on the table, in the cold and brutal climate of the region. Josef and his father live for part of the year in a cabin in the Carpathian Mountains and ply their trade of husbandry in order to survive.

At the age of ten, Josef is introduced to his father’s Krag rifle, and is instructed in the art of hiding and hunting their prey. A distant cousin, Marian Pes–nicknamed Zlee–who was one year older than Josef, is sent to live with them. Zlee has an instinct for shepherding, and together they form a brotherly bond of love and respect. Josef’s sleep is haunted by dreams of loss and he gradually becomes distant from his father.

In 1916, when Zlee turns eighteen, both boys go to the conscription office to join up. Josef alters the age on his identity card so that he can go, too. During artillery training, they are recognized for their skill of aiming and shooting, and are sent to train as snipers, or “sharpshooters,” which in German is called Scharfschützen. What follows is a coming of age story set in the harsh climate and geography in the trenches of war–to Austria to train as Scharfschützen, and eventually to the sub-zero temperature of the Italian Alps.

Krivak writes with the precision and beauty of a finely cut gem and with the meticulous pace and purpose of a classical conductor. Every word is necessary and neatly positioned. His prose is evocative, poetic, and distilled. There is a place between the breath of the living and the faces of the dead, and that is where Josef’s soul resides. When the author takes the reader to the abyss of loss and the ghosts of Time, it is riveting. However, the emotional resonance was primarily potent in the prologue and only periodically in the body of the story, and was otherwise low-timbred and somewhat distancing. The narrative is so deliberately controlled that at times it felt antiseptic and dispassionate.

Krivak’s first novel is highly recommended as an addition to a library of World War I literature. This is an admirable debut, and it is evident from the prologue that Krivak is capable of crafting an emotionally satisfying story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Andrew Krivak
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Work Song by Ivan Doig A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

Bibliography:

• The Sojourn (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008)

“She knows she is beginning to marmorealize into the character called “widow,” untouchable, dark, by definition unhappy, sexless. Her body is fighting for her, for her, for some existence it recognizes as oxygen, water, sustenance.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

There is a legend of the thorn bird; as it impales itself and dies, it rises above its own agony to outsing the nightingale and the whole world stills to listen. As humans face death – our own or our most beloved – the best writers have the ability to rise up and eloquently sing. I speak, of course, of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, of Francisco Goldman in Say Her Name, of David Vann in Legend of a Suicide. And now, Michelle Latiolais takes her place in that very top tier of talented writers.

Ms. Latiolais masterly interweaves stories of life after her husband Paul’s death with other tales: the complex eroticism experienced by a woman visiting a male strip club with her lover, the trials of traveling to Africa with an anthropologist husband who is researching the unusual eating habits of aboriginals, young children who entice an ancient aunt to craft shapes out of moistened bread crumbs. In a few sparse words, she is able to capture a deep and complex emotion.

Take the eponymous title story. Ms. Latiolais writes, “Sometimes wandering is not better; it’s the horror of having no place she is going, no place he needs her to be, wants her to be, no one wanting her the way he wanted her. Then she sleeps, long blacked-out hours, her head beneath pillows, the quilt, and when she wakes, her pink pearls, sinuous on the vanity, comfort her…”

Or her story “Crazy,” when it dawns on a wife that her husband – a drama professor – is unfaithful: “Benson knew an audience at his back when he had one, and he never touched her, never even leaned down to kiss her on the cheek—blameless—but this was how she, his wife in the window, knew. All theater people hugged and kissed all the time. They were crazy for it.”

Tales of loss and betrayal – true and fictionalized – are interspersed with sensuous tales and images, of pink porcelain saucers with earthenware lips folded in and fluted out, spawning erotic fantasies…of exotic meals of lamb stew with garlic and baby lima beans, ladled over buttered couscous…of fine fabrics…of longing.

And throughout, Ms. Latiolais reveals a love affair with words, the aural and etymological echoes , the mouth-sounds, the ravishing beauty. This is a writer who reflects on her wording (and whose characters do as well) and who also understands the limitations of words when strong emotions render them useless.

The writing positively pulsates with pain and beauty, with heartbreak and reverence, with alienation and survival. In short, it is stunning writing, courageous writing; as Ms. Latiolais dances and weaves her way through her grief, it is only in the last story, “Damned Spot,” that we, her readers, learn the reality of Paul’s death. By then, we are invested enough so that our hearts shatter into little pieces.

Some of the pieces in this collection were written long before Paul died; others were written in response to his death. All provide compassionate insight and flinching detail and position Ms. Latiolais as a writer to be reckoned with.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michelle Latiolais
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on WidowExcerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates Legend of a Suicide by David Vann The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Even Now (1992)
• A Proper Knowledge (2008)
• Widow: Stories (February 2011)