Book Review: When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut

This is a stunning book.

If some scientists and mathematicians have seen further than others, it is by standing on the mountains of madness. This straddles between being a faithful and fanciful biography of insanity. It is written like a hyperactive friend trying to show you how all the things in the universe connect with each other - while you slowly back away in terror.

Are these ghost stories? Biographies dictated from beyond the grave? Counter-factual histories written to bemuse and confuse? These are the implausibly mystic crystal revelations that strain the boundary between realities.

Science is terrifying. It ought to be. It tells us that the world isn't quite what we thought it was. If you found out the secret to the universe, how would you react? In many ways, it remind me of Asimov's "Breeds There A Man…?".

The prose is sublime and the stories are haunting. Highly recommended!