Explore Booksellers’ titles range from AI to post-WWII

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends a novel take on AI, an examination of the problem of plenty and a Dutch post-WWII tale.

---

From the publisher: Benjamín Labatut’s “When We Cease to Understand the World” electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In “The Maniac,” Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

From Bobby Moyer, bookseller: An unclassifiable novel, at once historical while managing to invoke new insight with flourishes of philosophical import, Labatut descends into the mind and matter of one of history’s most consequential figures. In prose that reads with the rapidity of a thriller, Labatut braids a narrative that leaves the reader to face consequences that are at once foreign, but seemingly come to be viewed as inevitable. Suggested for those who enjoyed “Oppenheimer” or read “American Prometheus.”

---

From the publisher: This book upends our understanding of international relations, and the grand strategies needed to navigate a complex, dangerous world, by describing how the world has transitioned from the problems of scarcity to the problems of plenty.

From Rich Hannigan, staff: Since the 1960s, authors from Buckminster Fuller to Yuval Noah Harrari have observed a profound transformation: The problems of abundance have become greater threats to humanity than the problems of scarcity. Think climate change, global pandemics and nuclear annihilation. Few authors, though, have examined how this shift in reality should influence the practice of American foreign policy. In “The Taming of Scarcity,” Francis J. Gavin attempts to fill this gap, packing multiple insights into a book so concise you can almost fit it into your back pocket. 

---

From the publisher: It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: I loved the steady buildup of tension and suspense that characterizes the first portion of this novel, which was shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize. “The Safekeep” takes a critical look at the willful ignorance that was scaffolded by a society all too willing to turn away from the horrors of World War II and its aftermath.

Type of Story: Review

An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.