Cover Image: When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

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*received for free from netgalley for honest review* really great read, learned a lot of stuff from this and i would buy it for sure!

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Original and fascinating series of stories. Each one is interesting but together they make up a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts. (I finished this in the fall, but wanted to share a quick belated review as thanks.)

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Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for an advance copy of this audiobook. I loved it!

I had been excited about this book ever since it made Obama’s reading list, and had been eagerly awaiting its US release. It really exceeded my expectations in every way; I learned so much from this book, and was totally riveted by the combination of fiction and nonfiction, which felt very fresh and original.

The questions the book posed are the biggest possible; about the limits of human imagination and what happens to those who dare to contemplate things beyond those limits; about the relationship and tenous boundaries between genius and madness, about whether there’s an understanding of the world so radically different from our conventional one that to even contemplate it is to risk one’s sanity.

I found myself repeatedly heading to Google to see what was real and what was fictional; almost everything I researched turned out to be true. I could not believe I had never encountered these stories and many of these historical figures before.

The one minor thing that did not entirely work for me was the weird sexual dreams and fantasies; I don’t think I’m a prudish reader, and I guess I saw the narrative point of them, but they were the parts of the book that most took me out of the sense that I was reading a true story-- they were just so outlandish and speculative that they were a bit jarring, reminded me that the author was willing to take some significant (but to my mind, mostly unnecessary) liberties with these real historical figures.

This book will without question be among my year’s top ten, and I expect I will probably return to it again in the coming years to see what I missed the first time. In terms of the audiobook production, I thought the reader was excellent; in a book with lots of international names and words, his pronunciation seemed assured and correct. It was clearly read at a good pace, despite some complicated ideas and unfamiliar words. I really enjoyed and would recommend the audio version of this book.

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I honestly did not thing I'd enjoy this book as much as I did! I found myself intrigued by the stories, wonderfully researched, it's hard to remember while reading that there must be a line between the real and what must be fiction, which I thought at first would bother me, but as I continued to read I found myself accepting it all as real. I enjoyed this immensely.

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This book was very interesting. In a very intense way, like you're not sure if you're reading fact or fiction, or something in between. There truly is a fine line between genius and madness.

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This wonderful, perfect book. Taking the discoveries and scientific thoughts from out foremost 20th century knowledge-bearers and putting forth a new mythology from those ideas. Take a bow Mr. Labatut, your experimentation has led you to a new form of novel(?) that really captured my brain. Physicists, mathematicians, and chemists are brought to life to show how progress constantly brings further discoveries, more life, and death to the world. Spend a day with this book, learn things and feel things.

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I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve wanted to read a non-fiction piece, and yet here I am, finding excuse after excuse of manual labor so I can keep listening to this audiobook. When We Cease to Understand the World is essentially a collection of short biopics, detailing the lives of various mathematicians and physicists in the 20th and 21st centuries who either went down the spiral of madness due to his discoveries, or used that madness to fuel them. Described as literary non-fiction, I found myself absolutely enthralled by the sheer absurdity and bizarreness of the lives of these men and how single events changed the landscape of mathematics and physics as we know it.

What really captivated me is that as an engineering student, every equation, every scientist who’s stories are told are people that I’ve had to learn and work with and it was both fascinating and a little horrifying (as a first year PhD student) to learn that yeah, those theories and equations that shook the entire field to its core? The guy who discovered them spent three months in a fever-dream and once lucid, had no idea how he’d reached the conclusions he did. And while the author admits to embellishing here and there (do we know for certain Heisenberg’s feverdream discovery of the Uncertainty Principle really culminated with hallucinations of Goethe sucking off the still hard erection of the corpse of Hafez, an Islamic poet he’d much admired? Probably not, but the imagery is very striking), the biopics themselves are largely factual.

Overall, I rate this book a 5/5. Bizarre yet enthralling. Labatut paints a grim picture of a future where, we, as humanity, can no longer truly comprehend the laws governing our natural world. Yet, the laws of physics do no change because we refuse to look at them. So is it better to know and confront madness, or stay sane but ignorant?

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NetGalley provided ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Well, this was... beautifully written. Benjamín Labatut provided an engaging series of stories, each one at some point leaving me looking like O_O or :O or :(
I picked this book up from the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelf in NetGalley, which sort of surprised me later, but I think I understand the consideration since it falls under historical fiction. It’s been a while since I’d read a book that tap-danced around the border between ‘literary’ vs ‘speculative’ fiction while maintaining a clean, reliable voice throughout. “The Overstory” by Richard Powers is another great example, but while it offers its fair share of delightful and/or disturbing info on human relationships with nature, Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World” delves into a whole other category: the human mind and what happens to us when we approach, or even break, the barriers of our understandings of reality.
Each discovery of such magnitude often comes with a price, usually including the discoverer’s social life, health, or sanity. And while Labatut wields his creative license more and more as the book moves along, so much of the content was based on or inspired by actual events and proves that, sometimes, fact can be weirder than fiction. The chain of events with each individual and their respective discoveries are fascinating in how they fed even greater advancements, for better or for worse. When you’re one of few geniuses dissecting what makes the very fabric of our universe and you discover info surrounding... hmm, black holes, maybe? – it’s acceptable, or at the very least understandable, to behave like you just peered into the eyes of some Lovecraftian monstrosity.
I have to add that I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator, Adam Barr, was phenomenal. Like the book, he sounded academic without coming off too dry or taking away from the creative nature of the piece.

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These interwoven short stories contained a mixture of fact and fiction. The protagonists are the mathematics, physics, and astrophysics giants of the last couple of centuries. Their achievements are explained in terms anyone can understand.

The writing was excellent and West, the translator, did a fantastic job rendering these words into English. I enjoyed Barr’s voice and overall narration. Labatut partly fictionalized the details of the lives of these men, going so far as to describe hallucinations some had in moments of madness. The moral turpitude of one in particular was disturbing.

Four and a half stars for this interesting book. I would have given it five had it been one tale instead of several sort-of merged stories. Labatut is a good enough writer to have pulled that feat off. This book rekindled my love for astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and physics, even if I never will be able to handle the necessary mathematics.

My thanks to Dreamscape Audio via Netgalley.

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3 stars

Equal parts engaging, heartbreaking, fascinating, and informative. A few years I ago I tried reading this and couldn’t get passed the first few chapters due to a bit of boredom, for some reason I would get distracted put it down and forget about it, so when I saw the audiobook available on netgalley I quickly sent in my request, and I definitely recommend it if you like me found yourself struggling with getting through the text.

The narrator has a nice clear and somewhat calming voice that has you comfortably engaged, there were a few moments that I caught myself almost falling asleep because of the nice and even tone of his voice so heads up on that. Overall, I’m really happy I was able to find a format that allowed me to enjoy this book.

ARC given by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

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