The Last Book I Read

Kitty Ferguson's book tracing the influence of the ancient philosopher Pythagoras down through the centuries was a surprisingly good read. I can't remember how or where I heard about it (maybe from the New York Review of Books), but I'm glad I jotted it down as something to look for this summer. It's an outstanding intellectual history that serves not only to explain how Pythagoras and his followers constructed their views and shared their discoveries over 2500 years ago (most central to the book's "plot" is their discovery of the natural numeric relationship of musical notes necessary to create sonic harmony), but also serves as an excellent survey of the means by which knowledge itself traverses both space and time. My own grasp of math and science is pretty rudimentary, but Ferguson made some pretty complex notions entirely clear which, rather than bogging the story down, contributed to the narrative momentum as the ideas spread and often were revised from one generation to the next. Just as compelling as her obvious grasp of the mathematics involved in this story is her willingness to engage elements of faith without becoming patronizing, a fair treatment especially given the variety of motivating, and perspective-shaping, forces that operated on such descendants of Pythagoras as, for example, Johannes Kepler. Ferguson, herself a musician, was perhaps attuned to this potential balance between science and something more metaphysical in its nature by the power of music to transcend purely mathematical precision to move a listener on a more fundamental level, a trait that seems entirely consistent with the worldview she ascribes to Pythagoras himself. This was the book of the summer so far for me.