Books

The Double Helix

Nobel prize winner tells a personal account of the discovery of structure of DNA, as it says on the tin.

It’s delightfully catty, gossipy, and petty. When he’s not casually throwing around polysyllabic jargon, he’s mostly either freely discussing his own relatively minor priorities or unabashedly dragging his contemporaries. 

He spends more time on the challenges of securing grants, housing, and worldly comforts than he does on the actual mechanics of doing science. 

He roasts poor Rosie. No clue if it was a fair picture, but it smacked of spurned lover to me. The other scientists get a spectrum of warts-and-all portrayals ranging from mostly favorable to disdainful.

And I absolutely loved it for all this. It amounts to a compelling and believable portrait of Watson’s mind at the time of his discovery. You just have to treat him as an unreliable literary narrator and not as a faithful reporter. 

The juxtaposition of the importance of the discovery with the immaturity (nonjudgmental) of the co-discoverer is rewarding in itself and highlights how accessible achievement can be.

Highly recommended, especially for anyone who enjoyed Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Two brothers murder a man out of honor and the narrator reconstructs the events afterward.

You gotta read it.

I don’t often feel unqualified to review a book, but I do here. Woefully so. I can normally look back on a book and say “this is the technique, that’s why it felt so poignant.”

But Marquez has a way of mysteriously pressing on a psychosexual-emotional-social funnybone that makes my whole consciousness tingle inexplicably. What would be a routine scene in the hands of another author just absolutely sings in his universe, consistently.

If you’ve read 100 Years of Solitude, you know what I mean. This book feels like a long newspaper account from that universe. It’s kind of like a bizarro murder mystery.

Highly recommended for all.

Gabo one of the best to ever do it

100 years is one of a kind and Love in the Time of Cholera is an all time favorite

will have to read this one this summer