Autumn is the first of four slight books in the author’s Seasons series.  It takes the form of a letter to the author’s unborn child, and is divided into numerous short essays about the world, with the purpose of informing his imminent family member about that world. He covers a wide variety of subjects, and although they sound encyclopedic in nature,…

Brian Keating was the inventor of BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization), created to capture the aftershocks of cosmic inflation. In other words, to seek evidence of moments after the Big Bang – which is what cosmology is all about. Well, BICEP2 did just that and three scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for the discovery. But Keating was not one of them,…

In this very intimate memoir, Jamie Bernstein shows us what it was like growing up with the force of nature that was Leonard Bernstein.  She pulls no punches as she directly addresses L.B.’s drug and alcohol use, homosexuality, and other foibles, and the effect all of this had on her and her two siblings.  While Jamie had a number of problems,…