• Hardcover
• 291
• The Tenth Muse
• Catherine Chung
• English
• 09 May 2019
• 9780062574060

Catherine Chung õ 6 READ

SUMMARY The Tenth Muse READ The Tenth Muse í PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB N becoming a mathematician she must face the most human of problems who is she What is the cost of love and what is the cost of ambition On her uest to conuer the Riemann Hypothesis the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany Forced to confront some of the mos All the World s A Pulpit Catherine Chung has issues Many many issues All packed tightly into this sardine tin like novel of academic mathematics misogyny and male cruelty of almost every sort to women casual racism inter generational miscommunication parental abandonment and lone parenting warfare on two continents international child smuggling American academic politics absence of sisterhood in science the sad biographies of a number of important mathematicians ancient and modern most ending badly personal betrayal sexual harassment family deceit PTSD some not very subtle didacticism about number theory and oh yes the frustrations of research into the proof of the Riemann HypothesisChung has just too many axes to grind so many that none are made very sharp at all I get it that most men are dicks and that women suffer terribly as a conseuence But this is hardly a revelation That racism is endemic in small town America is also not a surprise That families have secrets lovers irritate one another and life is often complicated and disappointing are not terribly newsworthy or fiction worthy topics unless some other literary purpose is served Even the uite valid point that injustice reigns in a supposedly civilised world is on its own nothing than a trite observation Chung s appreciation of the aesthetics of mathematics is clear but her skill in communicating that appreciation is far less so And the narrative glue the central mystery of the piece is so unlikely that it verges on literary criminality The whole leads nowhere at least nowhere interesting certainly not a destinationI think the takeaway from this book is that if an author intends to preach he or she really has to decide what they want to preach about The sin and its source have to be made explicit Universal evil doesn t have much credibility even among hardened Gnostics Serious writers then must ensure that no one knows they re preaching if they re doing so outside a church synagogue or mosue Preaching reaches only as far as the choir in any case and often not even that far Much better to let moral outrage emerge through subtle insight than to have one s protagonists agonise continuously about it And if you re describing bad behaviour it helps to suggest a way such behaviour might be mitigated other than by the wholesale incarceration of those bearing the XY chromosomal infirmity Otherwise even your fans might abandon the cheap seats for a entertaining venue

SUMMARY The Tenth Muse

SUMMARY The Tenth Muse READ The Tenth Muse í PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB The first thing I remember being said of me with any consistency was that I was intelligent and I recognized even then that it was a comment leveled at me with as much disapproval as admiration Still I never tried to hide or suppress my mind as some girls do and thank God because that would have been the beginning of the endFrom childhood Katherine knows she is different and that her parents are not who they seem to be But i Something in my chest that had begun to uncoil days after I read this book seized up again while I wrote this review as uickly as if someone had held a light to kindling There s a wordless agony to reading stories about women who wanted freedom than the world wished to give a woman I often felt myself running with a swift clear rage the feeling like the blast of fire rising up a dragon s throat leaving my mouth tasting of ash But a thrum of awe still fills me along with an unexpectedly sweet surge of hope in spite of all the coursing anger knowing that although cast out ostracized and dispossessed the bolt of these women s triumph always slid home All my life I ve been told to let go as gracefully as possible What s worse after all than a hungry woman greedy for all that isn t meant to be hers Still I resist In the end we relinuish everything I think I ll hold on while I can Forceful cerebral and immaculately controlled The Tenth Muse is a dazzling portrait of a young woman who refused to fit the shape of the small space the world left for herKatherine had shone brighter by a great deal than was normally permitted a woman The Riemann hypothesis was the mystery that had opened her mind like a door and she has never doubted that the path to it would one day open stark and clear before her feet Katherine s desire to come out on top was born out of the conviction that she didn t have to be her opponents eual to be considered a worthy contender she had to be better But in her obsession with cracking the uncrackable euation an underlying crisis emerges young and drifting Katherine is searching for identity and answers to the tragedy that had ruptured her family foreverFrom its first sentence The Tenth Muse grabs the reader with its directness and earnestness I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman Katherine begins looping into myself interrupting Thus standing knee deep in the rubble of her life Katherine starts delicately piecing it back together losing her footing and slipping but rising every time to scrabble forward one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages toward the realization that only at the end of one s life can one look back and see lucidly the prices they paid along the wayKatherine chronicles her own tale and the novel spasms with her remembrance like synapses firing in the dark The novel spans a number of difficult decades and Katherine s memories are seized up measured and weighted her mother s face glossy with joy beaming through her haze and her subseuent absence like having a rib wrenched from her side the lovers she na vely refused to see anything about except their most engaging ualities which she then cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all their less desirable ones the male colleagues who had made the mistake of believing her discomfort would be like theirs her works validated and stolen in one fell swoop the loss of her brilliance the withering of her grace all the things that had to be worked and learned through errors and trials and above all her indigence over ineuality the plight of women in the world and the madness that rose from a new creeping certainty that there is only so much forcing of the world a woman can doKatherine stains the page with herself and the tone of her voice urgent yet measured gives the impression that she is unburdening herself to a patient and sympathetic interviewer The result is a profoundly searching book one that could potentially be frustrating for readers who reuire propulsive plots and clean resolutions as it offers neither Still Chung makes it work beautifully by impeccably building a sense of inexorable apprehension as we begin to discern elements of self deception and omission in Katherine s narration and secrets swell to bursting with world shaking promiseAs the novel probes the secrets and lies that thrum beneath the surface of Katherine s family The Tenth Muse demonstrates heartbreakingly how acts of brutality even those distant in time and geography cast a dark shadow over relationships Through Katherine s voice The Tenth Muse also explores the cold outer limits of ambition and each word falls sharp like a butcher cutting meat Don t you know the rule they said that the price of your dearest wish is always everything you have Katherine s want hard and spare took hold of her driving out the fears the ones people tried to give her tried to put into her heart with dark looks and patronizing smiles But Katherine not only navigates her gender in a male dominated field she navigates her mixed race as well Ethnicity gender these things don t matter until they do and it s as exuisitely articulated as anything this thoughtful author has put to the pageThe central message of Katherine s character arc is one that I should ve seen coming but didn t and felt fear in me gleaming like water when I finally realized the author s goals for her That said The Tenth Muse isn t all grim The heart is always able to beat with a new rhythm and this sentiment is core to the novel I won t dare spoil the context but the final words spoken still shudder through my mind in the end we can only unlock our own locks we have only the gift of ourselves Highly recommended

SUMMARY The Tenth Muse READ The Tenth Muse í PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB T conseuential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generationsIn The Tenth Muse Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous sweeping tale about legacy identity and the beautiful ways the mind can make us fr Ebook read own Plusas a bonusI listened skimmed a little to the audiobook from the library overdriveread by the audiobook goddess Cassandra Campbell The Tenth Muse was a FANTASTIC SURPRISE I have no idea why I put off reading it reviews from Peter Paromjit and Barbara are outstanding Read them I could honestly just cut and paste THEIR REVIEWS lol Butwhat my friends didn t tell me mean people was NOT TO MISS THIS BOOK I mean really don t skip this treasure or listen to the audiobook either is great choice It has a lot of emotional heart Cassandra Campbell always does justice to the written wordsAndCatherine Chung wrote outstanding words great fit together The storytelling drew me in immediately it felt a little like a memoir but it s historical fiction Nobody has to be mathematician you don t even need to know how to addto enjoy this bookbut those who are in mathematic academia will delight in the math chatter problem solving sections Silly me god I have too much time on my hands some days I started googling Berhard Reimann wanting to know a little bit about the German mathematician who made contributions to analysis number theory and differential geometry if you just fell asleep reading that sentence there is from where it came from Google is a nice friend The biggest thing I learned was that people who try to conuer the Reimann Hypothesis don t do it for money Well there is 1 million dollars to be earned if you do so I wouldn t shake off the bonus prize too easily Sowith google s helpI thought I d uickly solve the challenging Reimann Hypothesis for free HaI failed I just got hungry But back to chatter and book reporting on The Tenth Muse There are main and subplots themes worth discussingieadvance mathnumberphile family background family history relationships loss abandonment prejudice competitiveness selfworth history politics mythology literature thriller mystery aspects womanhood manhood women in a field dominated by men life challenges in generallove and all the complexities of love mixed with career passions Ladieswhat would you do if you were only one of three women at a large academic conference with other men Would you purposely choose to hang around the other couple of women or would you avoid them completely why or why not The book describe a scene that had me look at the situation very differently than what I thought I would normally have doneThe reason I jumped to read this book now in the first place was because Catherine Chung s book The Tenth Muse was chosen as our book of the year part of our local Silicon Valley Reads program I love finishing a book that has much to examine then going to a group talk after Catherine was scheduled to be speaking at different venues and library s all over town I was looking forward to attending Butall events have been canceled due to the coronavirus that has hit our area Emergency declaration has been mandated all mass gatherings are cancelled Forty five people have been confirmed coronavirus positive in my area Increased numbers are anticipated SoI won t be hearing Catherine Chung speak about this book but I definitely recommend reading it reading it with a buddy would add value too It s an overall great novel with much interest to keep any reading junkie in the 7th heaven unputdownable satiated zone THIS IS HOW THIS BOOK BEGINS Everyone knows that ONCE UPON A TIME there were nine muses They were known as the daughters of Zeus and wise men loved them for they bestowed the gift of genius Sing in me O Muse cried Homer and the muses answered filling his voice and spinning out his mortal talents to make immortal tales What not everyone knows is that once there existed another sister who chose a different path She was the youngest of them and the most reckless and when she came of age and it was time to claim and art she shook her head and she refused She said she did not wish to sing in the voices of men telling only the stories they wished to tell She preferred to sing her songs herself Katherine grew up in a small town New Umbria Michigan in the 50 sAsian American mixed race with Jewish blood a math prodigyShe knew she was different and she knew what she was up against She wanted what she wanted to be respected for her academic brilliance and also for her right to enjoy being a girl you can sing The Flower Girl Song now I enjoy being a girl Point is she didn t have to dress like a man even though she was mostly and predominantly working along side men than women Wonderful looking back reflective story you ll learn about Katherine s coming of age schools she attendedcollege post graduate education the background of Katherine s parents withheld secrets legends the brutal devastation that WWII was goals mistakes regrets dreams and hopeand the essence between math and love Kudos to Catherine Chung I really enjoyed her book and hope to meet her here in the Bay Area one of these days