This week’s Briefly Noted, more briefly. (Subscribers can read the full reviews.)
“When the Killing’s Done,” by T. C. Boyle (Viking; $26.95)
Boyle turns this potentially tedious and moralistic plot into a generation-spanning thriller that includes shipwrecks, wildlife attacks, and an ill-fated rescue mission.
“Three Stages of Amazement,” by Carol Edgarian (Scribner; $25)
This tender novel about two people looking for “moments of grace” is set in the very recent past, and a strenuous topicality—Barack Obama and Bernard Madoff loom large—occasionally undermines the emotional pull.
“The Hidden Reality,” by Brian Greene (Knopf; $29.95)
Novices may occasionally be stymied by notions of size and time that defy easy analogy—“Is three times infinity larger than plain old infinity?”—but those who persist will take seriously Greene’s impassioned argument for “the capacity of mathematics to reveal secreted truths about the workings of the world.”
“The Magnetic North,” by Sara Wheeler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26)
Visiting Russian Gulags and trucking alongside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Wheeler notes that governmental indifference and interference have stranded Arctic peoples between tradition and modernity: “In Nuuk I saw a pair of nylon panties pegged on a washing line next to a row of curing seal ribs.”
