![]() ![]() ![]() “Figuring” doesn’t succeed in spite of its grand ambition and scope, but because of it. It would all be painfully overwrought and embarrassing if Popova wasn’t such a skilled writer and scholar, or such a deeply empathetic and human storyteller. As Virginia Woolf would describe it, “Figuring” is “no longer rooted, but gold flowing.” Popova examines the lives of the people usually excluded from science writing (mostly queer women) and in doing so, crafts a narrative about the way people move through history and the way they perceive the scope of the universe. In her hands, biography becomes liquid gold. Maria Popova transforms scientific logic and reason into poetry and poetry into calculus. It’s a tapestry, woven out of the stories of various scientists and writers throughout history, connecting history, memory and personal experience to theories of astronomy, theoretical physics and ecology. ![]() It’s a work of alchemy in the oldest, most classical use of the word. It’s also not quite poetry, not quite prose, not exactly a short story collection - and yet it’s also kind of all of these things. “Figuring” isn’t quite a work of science fiction or biography. ![]()
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