Title: When We Cease to Understand the World
Author: Labatut, Benjamín
Publisher: New York Review Books
Pages: 193
Date Read: 21 December 2024
Bookshelves: read
My Rating (out of 5): ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I decided to read this book on the strength of a single excerpt I found randomly on the internet. Humans have been known to risk it all for love, country and iniquity; but I have done similar things in the quest of the perfect paragraph like the one you’re about to read.
_“The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.” _
Needless to say, this was a very well-written book. The book is replete with beautiful paragraphs such as the above which speaks to the talent of the author and the ability of the translator. It is a book about science, some of its major actors, and the outsized consequence of their work to the arc of humanity.
We learn of the complicated legacy of Fritz Haber, who championed the use of chemical weapons in World War 1, but whose discovery of ammonia, a major component of fertilizers, accelerated humanity’s headcount to 8 billion in a few short decades. We also learn of other scientists like Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Grothendieck and Schrodinger.
However, the book suffers from the problem of identity. It was hard to understand what the book set out to address from the jump. Was it fiction? Was it non-fiction? The book’s synopsis says it is a blend of both, which I found a little worrisome because how can a book be both things at once. Especially since the bulk of the book was themed around the lives of some of the most distinguished personalities in science. I conclude this book not knowing which of the stated events are historically accurate and which were conjured from the author’s imagination. In my opinion, the author did not make it clear enough where fiction ended and where non-fiction began. I think the book suffered due to this carelessness.
That said, if you can somehow look past the above shortcoming (as i have done), it is a great read and definitely worth your time.
Five stars !