BOOK REVIEW: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

This was my first audiobook. My husband and I listened to it on our anniversary vacation in Hawaii (Kauai and Kona).

The narrator is Bahni Turpin and she is quite impressive. She provided individual voices for each of the characters and her vocal inflections communicate the nuances of the story and made the book a delightful experience. I would probably "read" another audiobook by her from an author I was ambivalent about just because she was the narrator! (Yes, she is that good.)

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the audiobook experience overall. I feel like I did not have as continuously engaged an experience with the audiobook as I would have had if I had read the book in either "dead tree" or electronic form. But it was fun to share the experience with my hubby. There were some scenes and plot points that my husband asked me about that I missed but as a whole the book was the source of many thoughtful and interesting conversations, which is one of the key reasons to read, in my humble opinion.

All that being said, The Underground Railroad  is very effective at depicting the horrors of slavery and illustrating the toxic effects of white supremacy and legal racial subordination on both Black and White people. There's an especially affecting scene when the ramifications of harboring a fugitive slave in a upside-down version of North Carolina become chillingly clear.

Another thing that comes across is how difficult life was back then without the modern technological advances we are now used to (in 2017); I'm not talking about fancy inventions like iPhones and electric cars and the Internet, but basic necessities of modern life we almost always take for granted like antibiotics and anesthesia and electricity. 

The Underground Railroad also points out all the different ways that people's humanity is degraded by the various horrible jobs (slave catcher, slave boss, overseer et cetera) that they are forced to undertake in order to survive. This is true of the black people and the white people in the book.

Although its calling card is the fact that the "metaphorical" Underground Railroad we have heard of in history books is a real thing in the book, to me this was a minor point, and even a bit silly. The primary selling point of The Underground Railroad is its depiction of slavery (even in a fictionalized, heightened form).

The Underground Railroad is also a compelling (and action-packed) story about what happens to a number of slaves named Cora and Cesar.


Title: The Underground Railroad.
Author: Colson Whitehead.
Paperback: 320 pages.
Publisher: Doubleday.
Date Published: August 2, 2016.
Date Read: January 17, 2017.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

New $3M Prizes For Mathematics Announced!

Interesting news! There is going to be a new $3 million-dollar prize for advances in Mathematics, similar to the high-profile Breakthrough prizes that have been announced in Life Sciences and the Fundamental Physics prize. The funds for these prizes are coming from technology billionaires who are trying to raise the social status of people who work in the area of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The New York Times reports:

Starting next year, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, as it will be called, will join the Fundamental Physics Prize, which Mr. Milner established in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, which he set up a year ago in partnership with Sergey Brin of Google, Mr. Zuckerberg and Jack Ma, a Chinese entrepreneur, and their families. Each winner or winning team gets $3 million, making the awards the richest in science (this year’s Nobel Prize winners, for example, are each winning or sharing $1.2 million). 

[...] 

All the prizewinners are eligible to win again, but in the meantime they will help judge future contests. For the new math award, Mr. Milner and Mr. Zuckerberg, in consultation with experts, will choose the first winners. Mr. Milner declined to say how many mathematicians would be chosen, but there could be quite a number of windfalls in store: for the physics price, there were nine inaugural winners.

This sounds like a good idea to me but not everyone agrees. Professor Peter Woit of Columbia University is one such critic:

Even if the Milner-Zuckerberg prize does end up focused on the best mathematics research, I still think the whole concept is problematic. The US today is increasingly dominated by a grotesque winner-take-all culture that values wealth and celebrity above all else. While mathematics research, like the rest of academia, has been affected as a star system has become increasingly part of the picture, this field has been somewhat immune to celebrity culture. While people typically think that what mathematicians do is perfectly respectable, they don’t understand much about it and aren’t especially interested. Milner and Zuckerberg want to change this by turning mathematicians into celebrities, but I don’t see any reason to believe this is going to lead to better mathematics.

Woit's main issue with the prize is that he thinks the money could have a better use if directed somewhere else. That may be true, but although I support and defend his right to express his beliefs, it really seems like another example of someone external to a process making an observation about someone's decision to approach a problem in a particular way and critiquing it because what is being done doesn't align with how the critic sees the world or their goals. 

To me, the critic should promote their vision, unless they can make a compelling case for the idea that the activity they are critiquiing will actually have a deleterious impact on some universal good.

I don't think Woit's criticism does that. What do you think, do you think the $3 million Breakthrough Prizes in Mathematics will do more harm than good?