Admit it. You went back in time and killed Baby Hitler.
Official reason?
Because in 2018 you’re coming hard for these fascists, wherever and whenever they show up, and in most guises too, for sure including key babies.
… real reason?
Now Foster, who studied English at Dartmouth College, turns his eye toward poetry, a form he says he “didn’t know how to handle” in grade school. His new book, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, provides something of a blueprint for tackling verse while also disproving the notion that poetry is intimidating, esoteric, or, as Foster told the Guardian, “obscure on purpose”.
The Order of Time is a compact and elegant book. Each chapter starts with an apt ode from classical Latin poet Horace — I particularly liked “Don’t attempt abstruse calculations”. And the writing, translated from Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is more stylish than that in most physics books. Rovelli ably brings in the thoughts of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, sociologist Émile Durkheim and psychologist William James, along with physicist-favourite philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Willard Van Orman Quine.
The pacing of the novel is a key strength and I found myself racing to finish it, indeed, managed to do so within an hour of picking it up, partly because of its sparse, controlled clarity but also because of the dramatic intensity of the final scenes, when the two young protagonists come together unexpectedly. Overall, West fulfils the originality and the vision of The Redemption of Galen Pike and marks Davies’s successful expansion of her unique imaginative vision from the short story to the (short) novel.