Rebecca Goldstein: 8 books

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing...

Part of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original....

"A gem. . . . An unforgettable account of one of the great moments in the history of human thought." —Steven Pinker Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning— and brought him to the edge of madness.

From the author of The Mind-Body Problem: a witty and intoxicating novel of ideas that plunges into the great debate between faith and reason. At the center is Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. Dubbed...

A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion -- of the body and of the mind -- PROPERTIES OF LIGHT is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the...

Renee's problem, according to her best friend, is that she thinks "the male sexual organ is the brain." Dissatisfied with her marriage to a mathematical genius, Renee Feuer struggles to reconcile her intellectual and physical desires in a startlingly sexy and mordantly funny tale about the...

When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps, inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged....

Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront...