Serbian, with a supportive father who told her to "be bold" and become a leading woman physicist at a time when most Serbian women (and women of other nationalities) did not even seek university degrees, Marić wanted desperately to make her "papa" proud of her. Her desire, however, for an academic life, clashed with the uniform goal for women of her day -- marriage and children. This conflict played a large part in Marić's decision to keep her relationship with Einstein platonic for a number of years. During this time, Marić helped Einstein with his studies, and allowed him to play his violin at the musical evenings she and her female friends held at her Engelbrecht Pension (student boarding house for women). Eventually, after much soul searching, Marić did allow herself to become romantically involved with Einstein. The romance, and subsequent marriage were laden with problems and traumatic events, including the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching death of Marić's and Einstein's first born daughter from scarlet fever.
Benedict focuses almost entirely on Marić's thoughts and world view. An understandable approach since so little effort has been made by the scientific world to research Marić, her life, and her work, and establish what role she played in Einstein's 1905 breakthrough on relativity. Einstein does not fare well in Benedict's approach, perhaps that is his due, or perhaps more research must be done on his partnership with Marić. Benedict makes one fact clear, however, Einstein willingly broke with the rigid social and scientific norms of his day and treated Marić as an equal for at least a portion of their relationship.
Marić has been a little known figure in science history, and what writings there have been about her always mentioned Einstein. This has not been true about the thousands, perhaps millions, of writings about Einstein--very few mention Marić, and only recently has there been serious debate about whether Marić was the first to understand relativity, not Einstein. While Benedict lights up this debate in this fictional account, she clearly understands that the serious discussion has only just started. This is an important book.
(In return for an honest review, I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.)
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark (October 18, 2016)
Anne Perry's "A Christmas Message" reaffirmed why I love her books. Her ability to weave romance, mystery, history and the spiritual in an intelligent absorbing narrative is unsurpassed. She is unafraid to depict historical events that other authors avoid, and her characters age. Since I also age, it is refreshing to find protagonists on the far side of 40.
Major Pettigrew is a 68 year-old widower. His beloved wife Nancy has been gone for six years. His father was a British military officer stationed in Lahore, India in the last days before the partition of India and Pakistan in the 1940s. On his deathbed, his father's last wish was for each son to have one of a pair of valuable Churchill guns, and pledge to reunite the pair for future generations of Pettigrews. For many years, the Major has been bitter about the splitting of the pair of guns, but his brother has refused to sell it to him, and now his brother has died suddenly. The day he learns of the death, Mrs. Ali, a widowed Pakistani shop owner in his little village of Edgecombe St. Mary, has come to collect payment for his newspaper. She finds him about to collapse, and makes him tea. Thus is their friendship born.
Barbara Amaya was, literally, nobody's girl. Raised in the 1960s in Fairfax, Virginia by a father who worked at the Pentagon, and a stay-at-home, alcoholic mother, Amaya ran away to D.C. at 12 to escape her father's sexual abuse. After finding "refuge" with a hippy couple, she was soon selling her body on the streets of D.C. At 13, she was "sold" to a New York City pimp named Moses.
It is 1954 in Rochester, New York, a city known for its cold winters, where summer sometimes comes early "and sometimes not at all." Libby Archer's father has just died and left her with a large Victorian-style house, no college education and a fierce desire to see the world and experience life. Pressured by her neighbors and friends to marry as soon as possible, the complex Libby yearns for more. In what she hopes is an escape to independence she flies to family in Ireland aboard an early transatlantic airplane.
Imagine a world where everyone is telepathic and able to read the thoughts of everyone else. In "Crosstalk, "Connie Willis demonstrates that this is not just a bad idea, it is insanity. Doing what she does better than any other modern author, Willis takes us deep into a potentially feasible technology and then moves that technology just one step further. The result is an absorbing, and fascinating story, with a large dose of humor.
