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As the world churns
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Penny Vincenzi Random House AudioBooks, $29.95 9 hours abridged, CD ISBN 9780739343210
Two fascinating new audio presentations want to raise your literacy level. Not literacy as in being able to read, but literacy in religion and science, subjects that often clash and about which too many of us are woefully, even scandalously, ignorant. Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science is a wow. Angier is a brilliant, brilliantly agile Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer whose bubbling enthusiasm for her subject—the big issues in contemporary physics, chemistry, biology, geology and astronomy—is wonderfully contagious. If you're among those who can't tell "the difference between a proton, a photon and a moron," but have a nagging curiosity and a nagging feeling that you really ought to know more about these vital subjects, just open your ears and your mind as you listen—you'll learn a lot and have a great time doing it. Angier distills what she's learned from hundreds of conversations with top scientists about the most important scientific fundamentals, and makes "the invisible visible, the distant neighborly and the ineffable affable." Read by Nike Doukas with a verve that matches the author's own.
By Natalie Angier HighBridge, $39.95 13 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 9781598870893
By Stephen Prothero HarperAudio, $39.95 10 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 9780061236334
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Sheer Abandon, Penny Vincenzi's grand soap opera of a novel, is sheer entertainment and sheer fun. Zoom in to August 1986—"Baby Bianca," born in a broom closet at Heathrow airport and immediately abandoned by her mother, makes headlines in the London tabloids. Flash back to August 1985—Martha, Clio and Jocasta, carefree 18-year-olds on their way to Thailand and beyond for a "gap year" adventure, meet at the airport and spend time together in Bangkok with the promise, not kept, to stay in touch. Flash forward to August 2000—we find Jocasta, now a successful journalist, working on a story that will, with twists and turns galore, lead us to Clio, a gerontologist; Martha, a high-powered, highly paid attorney; the long-hidden secret of who is baby Bianca's mother (you know it's one of these three); and the now teenaged baby Bianca herself. Juicy subplots with love, marriage and careers seesawing from bliss to abyss and back keep you hooked and asking for more (I hope there's a sequel in the works). Narrator Rosalyn Landor is on the mark with each character—male, female, young and old.
Science and religion
Stephen Prothero believes that religion should be the fourth "R" and he doesn't pull any punches with the title of his carefully researched book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't. For openers, he offers an in-depth consideration of how such a religious country has become so religiously illiterate, how our schools and textbooks have come to obviate the role religion has played in American history and how not the knowing the Bible (Old Testament and New) can diminish our appreciation of Western civilization. You may or may not agree with his remedies, but they are provocative in a positive way. An informative A to Z "Dictionary of Religious Literacy" follows. It may raise your religious literacy level and, hopefully, inspire you to learn more about your own belief system and the other major religions that motivate millions in this peace-challenged world of ours.