An Imperfect Vacuum: The Differing Ways of Truth
Non-fictitious reviews of non-fictitious books
I have been a free-lance book reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer off and on since 2002. Now it is mostly off: as newspapers began merging and pooling their reporters, writers, and reviewers, the days of large Sunday book sections & week-day reviews are all but over for most papers in the US.
The following reviews were written from 2002–2014 — all published by the Philadelphia Inquirer except for one (Eco’s Queen Loana) by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They are no longer available at the newspaper websites.
Re-posting them in Medium has given me the chance to add relevant images. In most cases the text is exactly as originally published. However, in a few I have taken the liberty of adding back an occasional word or sentence that were deleted in order to keep within the contracted word-limit.
Of my book-reviewing heroes, I must credit Carlin Romano first, who was THE Inquirer reviewer for many years.
However, the best reviews I have ever read were those written by the fictitious reviewers who contributed fictitious reviews of fictitious books to A Perfect Vacuum, fictitiously-edited by the inestimable, non-fictitious Stanislaw Lem.
Lem’s rubric for rating books is as simple and profound as it gets:
“Good books tell the truth, even when they’re about things that never have been and never will be. They’re truthful in a different way.” ― Stanisław Lem
I was really lucky in my reviewing assignments — a good fraction of the books in the following list were truthful in a different way…
Reviews by R. A. DiDio
2014
The Meaning of Human Existence
By Edward O. Wilson
2013
The Riddle of The Labyrinth
The Quest To Crack An Ancient Code
By Margalit Fox
2012
Turing’s Cathedral
The Origins of the Digital Universe
By George Dyson
2011
Chasing the Sun
The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life
By Richard Cohen
2009
The Age of Wonder
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes
2008
The Forger’s Spell
A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
By Edward Dolnick
2007
The Ultimate Force
Gravity — Creator of Worlds
By Louis Girifalco
and
Faust in Copenhagen
A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
By Gino Segrè
Dishwasher
One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States
By Pete Jordan
God’s Gold
A Quest for the Lost Temple Treasures of Jerusalem
By Sean Kingsley
Einstein
His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
and
Einstein
A Biography
By Jürgen Neffe
Translated by Shelley Frisch
2006
Creators
From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney
By Paul Johnson
54
By Wu Ming
Translated from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside
2005
The Rescue Artist
A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
By Edward Dolnick
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
By Umberto Eco
Translated by Geoffrey Brock
Jimi Hendrix
The Man — The Magic — The Truth
By Sharon Lawrence
2004
Intellectual Morons
How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas
By Daniel J. Flynn
Dark Light
Electricity and Anxiety From the Telegraph to the X-Ray
By Linda Simon
The Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
2003
The Pythons Autobiography
By The Pythons
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Our Own Devices
The Past and Future of Body Technology
By Edward Tenner
2002
Measuring America
How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy
By Andro Linklater
Tuxedo Park
A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
By Jennet Conant
