World Books Review: The Birth of Infinity

The contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math, the nature of infinity, inspired this intriguing book. The French school chased rationalist solutions, while the Russian mathematicians were reportedly inspired by mystical insights attained through their religious practice, visions into the infinite that led to the founding of descriptive set theory.

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World Books Review: A Crown of Thorns for Mandelstam

“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Osip Mandelstam, the poet who embodied both a new era in Russian poetry and the martyrdom of Russia’s intelligentsia under Stalinism. But the book turns out to be a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a poet who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor.