“It can be difficult to pull off a love story,”
said Michael Schaub in NPR.org, “espe-
cially when one of the lovers is a ghost.”
But Amy Bonnaffons’ “wildly inventive”
debut uses that unlikely premise to ex-
plore the power and the limits of infatu-
ation. When Rachel meets Thomas, a
recent motorcycle casualty who’s been
sent back to earth for 90 days because
of a bureaucratic complication in the af-
terworld, their connection is instant and
passionate, enduring even after Rachel
discovers Thomas’ secret and even
though he has been warned not to ac-
cumulate any new regrets. “Bonnaffons
is excellent at depicting the unreasoning
nature of desire,” said Sam Sacks in The
Wall Street Journal. But “The Regrets, to
its detriment, is less interested in think-
ing about death.” You end up wonder-
ing if Rachel has absorbed the book’s
lessons. The ending will divide opinion,
said Bethanne Patrick in The Washing-
ton Post. Some readers may wish the
story had broadened and deepened.
“Others may be satisfied with this one’s
evanescence, its haunting irresolution a
reminder of our fleeting time on earth.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Brian Greene’s mind contains multiverses,
said Priyamvada Natarajan in The Wall
Street Journal. In his latest book, the
Columbia University theoretical physicist
“ventures into territory well beyond where
physicists typically roam.” Having previ-
ously produced “superbly written” best-
sellers about string theory and the nature of
the cosmos, he now aims to place human-
ity and its long quest for meaning in the
context of the almost unimaginably longer
history of the universe. That requires first
explaining how the universe began and how
the nature of its evolution underlies all of
human culture, beginning with our percep-
tion of time. As he proceeds into the devel-
opment of language, religion, art, and sci-
ence, “he weaves personal stories, scientific
ideas, concepts, and facts into a delightful
tapestry that showcases the multiple points
of view on these questions.”
Qandeel Baloch
in some ways suf-
fered a distressingly
ordinary fate, said
The Economist. A
Pakistani native, she
grew up in a small
village, submitted to
an arranged marriage
at 17, was beaten
by her husband, and
later died at the hands
of family in a so-called honor killing. But
before her death at 26, Baloch had fled
her marriage and reinvented herself as
Pakistan’s first social media star—a fig-
ure whose sexually provocative antics
earned her the sobriquet “Pakistan’s Kim
Kardashian.” Sanam Maher’s “elegantly
written” new book offers, besides much
else, “the most complete account so far of
how Baloch managed to take such a hold
on the popular imagination in Pakistan.”
Maher, a journalist, provides a “refresh-
ingly complicated” portrait of her subject,
Book of the week
Reading the book “is like riding an escala-
tor up through a giant department store,”
said Dennis Overbye in The New York
Times. “On the lower floors you find
things like time, energy, gravity, and the
Big Bang.” Farther up, as Greene leads the
way into debates about the mysteries of
consciousness and the origins of religion,
“he drags in all the experts—from Proust
to Hawking—and tries to be an honest
broker about the answers to questions we
can’t really answer.” Still, he takes stands,
arguing that we humans crave meaning
precisely because we know we will die. He
also concludes that the universe manifests
no grand design and that entropy will ulti-
mately erase everything humans achieve. In
a “virtuosic” final section, he ushers us into
a distant future to help us imagine the sun
burning out in a billion years and the Milky
Way later falling into a black hole. Even
protons, the building blocks of atoms, will
dissolve when the universe is 100 trillion
trillion trillion years old.
“Until the End of Time is packed with
ideas,” said Philip Ball in Nature.
“Whether they come together as a con-
vincing story is another matter.” Despite
his skill at distilling other scientists’ work,
Greene oversimplifies certain subjects,
particularly biology, and he has too much
faith that every explanation, even of great
art, must begin in particles, entropy, and
evolution. Greene, to his credit, would
probably welcome questions on these
matters. Think of his book, then, not as a
unified theory of all life and all history but
as a mere attempt at one by a thoughtful,
humanistic physicist. “It is an eloquent
invitation to debate.”
Until the End of Time: Mind,
Matter, and Our Search for
Meaning in an Evolving Universe
by Brian Greene (Knopf, $30)
Novel of the week
The Regrets
by Amy Bonnaffons (Little, Brown, $27)
A Woman Like Her: The Story
Behind the Honor Killing of a
Social Media Star
by Sanam Maher (Melville House, $28)
said Elizabeth Flock in The Washington
Post. “At times, Baloch seems immature
and attention-seeking; at others, she is
nervy and eloquent.” She won her initial
fame with a disastrous 2013 Pakistan Idol
audition that went viral and established her
persona as a daffy rich girl. She then used
her notoriety to repeatedly antagonize the
patriarchal society that tacitly endorses the
kind of violence that she’d endured. Baloch
sent a saucy public message to future prime
minister Imran Khan. She promised a strip-
tease if Pakistan’s cricket team beat India.
Online viewers began making death threats.
The tipping point came in 2016, when
Bal och posted photos of herself in a hotel
room with a prominent cleric, said Parul
Sehgal in The New York Times. That July,
her brother Waseem drugged and asphyxi-
ated her. But unlike so many of Pakistan’s
honor killings, this one couldn’t be covered
up. New legislation closed the loophole that
allowed a victim’s family to pardon the kill-
ers, and last fall, Waseem was sentenced to
life in prison. But Maher’s “exemplary work
of investigative journalism” finds no silver
lining. When the trailer for an upcoming
Baloch biopic was recently posted online,
the comments were familiarly ominous. The
actress who plays her, wrote one poster,
should be “murdered in the same way.”
The Milky Way: Mortality on a grand scale
NASA/Wikipedia