Angles of Reflection: A Memoir of Logic and a Mother's Love

Rating:
Summary: Degrees of Knowledge
Review: "Angles of Reflection" is a both a well-told story and interesting examination of how we deal with uncertainty. The main story--that of a mother and son dealing with the boy's serious illnesses--is compelling and poignant. The account of the fears and frustrations that Joan Richards faces as she struggles to care for her son will resonate with anyone who has cared for a sick child. While the story is a sad one, the love and courage it illustrates makes it enjoyable and ultimately uplifting.

What makes this book more than just a good story is that Richards weaves into the book the account of her work, studying the Victorian mathematician Augustus DeMorgan. She connects DeMorgan's work on the meaning of probability with the terrible uncertainty she faces about the life of her son. As she tries to balance her work and caring for her son, Richards is haunted by a letter of DeMorgan's. The letter in which DeMorgam first proposes the famous "four color" problem was written just before the death of his daughter, and yet he seems completely unaware of her illness.

Richards is both a talented novelist and an insightful scholar of mathematical history. The way she combines these two talents makes for a unique and wonderful book. I highly recommend it: it is the most enjoyable book I have read in a long time, and it also made me realize how the way we view the world scientifically and mathematically affects how we view it emotionally and personally.

Rating:
Summary: Good writing, but the point being made is hard to make out
Review: I found this book to be very well written, and at the beginning I had high hopes that I would like it very much. However, I found that as the book went on, I was less and less sure what point the author was trying to make and just what the focus of the book was supposed to be. What the author's son Ned went through with two unrelated and severe medical problems was compelling to read about, but not really enough to carry the book. The math history parts of the book often seemed quite unrelated to the main tale. Perhaps the book was a way to expose the many uncaring or distant medical professionals the author encountered, but this was not tied together into a real message. Or perhaps the author was telling her story to justify her decision not to return to the States with her son once he ran into medical troubles in Germany---which in my eyes didn't really need justifying---I would not see Germany as having less competant medical care than the US. In any case, I found the ending a bit unfinished---I didn't really see how all of a sudden Ned's elbow was fixed, and we were not told much about the final outcome of his seizures or his brain surgery, although the book was published at least 3 years after these problems started. I feel there could have been a much better book here with more focus and more of a unified point. However, I did finish the book and am still thinking about it--a sign of something worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Many angles to reflect upon
Review: I have read this book twice, and recommended it to several friends, and find it a most complex and multi-faceted tale. On the one hand a poignant account of a sick child,and an examination of the difficult decisions everyone has to make under uncertainty, it is much more than that as it weaves Newton, Leibniz and Augustus de Morgan and the choices they made into the story. It was in many ways a brave decision of Joan Richards to write and publish this book, and those who read it can judge for themselves her success--I found it riveting, and even better on the second reading.

Rating:
Summary: Divided Lives Redux
Review: I just spent the past Saturday afternoon reading _Angles of Reflection_ by Joan L. Richards and was quite moved by it. For anyone who has had to grapple with balancing work and family -- including in academics where one's schedule is flexible but at times consuming and unpredictable -- this book is a must read along with other similar volumes, such as _Divided Lives_ and _True North_. Richards's depictions of "mother's time" and "professional time", as well as the conflict between the two, could very well have been a chapter in Alan Lightman's _Einstein's Dreams_. German culture is not a very hospitable environment for working mothers, but Richards navigates skillfully through maternal care, professional meetings, and daily annoyances like sharply abbreviated hours for grocery shopping. Her depiction of the German medical system, a form of socialized medicine, might be looked upon as idiosyncratic and Byzantine by all except those of us who have to deal with American HMO's on a regular basis. Past and present, as well as life and art, overlap in this deliciously engrossing volume: as she cares for her son, Richards works through the intricacies of her biographies of Augustus and Sophia De Morgan and finds in their child, Alice, a parallel story of parental concern. Richards's story reminded me of a statement attributed to Jackie Kennedy Onassis: when asked about raising her children, she is supposed to have said, "If I fail at this, nothing else matters." Above all else, Richards's love and care for her two boys shine through this volume, even on pages dense with Newton, the De Morgans, and probability theory. This book, written in the tradition of Jill Ker Conway, is required reading for anyone, but especially for those curious about how the thinking lives of academics intersects with the practical and emotional lives of the everyday world. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Divided Lives Redux
Review: I just spent the past Saturday afternoon reading _Angles of Reflection_ by Joan L. Richards and was quite moved by it. For anyone who has had to grapple with balancing work and family -- including in academics where one's schedule is flexible but at times consuming and unpredictable -- this book is a must read along with other similar volumes, such as _Divided Lives_ and _True North_. Richards's depictions of "mother's time" and "professional time", as well as the conflict between the two, could very well have been a chapter in Alan Lightman's _Einstein's Dreams_. German culture is not a very hospitable environment for working mothers, but Richards navigates skillfully through maternal care, professional meetings, and daily annoyances like sharply abbreviated hours for grocery shopping. Her depiction of the German medical system, a form of socialized medicine, might be looked upon as idiosyncratic and Byzantine by all except those of us who have to deal with American HMO's on a regular basis. Past and present, as well as life and art, overlap in this deliciously engrossing volume: as she cares for her son, Richards works through the intricacies of her biographies of Augustus and Sophia De Morgan and finds in their child, Alice, a parallel story of parental concern. Richards's story reminded me of a statement attributed to Jackie Kennedy Onassis: when asked about raising her children, she is supposed to have said, "If I fail at this, nothing else matters." Above all else, Richards's love and care for her two boys shine through this volume, even on pages dense with Newton, the De Morgans, and probability theory. This book, written in the tradition of Jill Ker Conway, is required reading for anyone, but especially for those curious about how the thinking lives of academics intersects with the practical and emotional lives of the everyday world. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: For the love of angles
Review: I want it for my mom she is and angle and she should be in this book!!!

Rating:
Summary: Drawn from life
Review: This book bubbled out of me late at night, when the rest of my world was asleep. I had been granted two years off from university teaching in order to write a book about the history of mathematics. Instead I was spending much of my time and all of my emotional energy trying to care for my younger child who was very ill.

At first I wrote in hopes of imposing some kind of order onto a chaotic situation, calming myself by writing it down. Over time though, I began to see a shape in what I was writing, and I moved from recording events to telling a story. The story is a braided one, in which my twentieth-century life as the mother of a sick child, is twined around the life and thought of a nineteenth-century mathematician and his family.

What emerged from the intertwining of my personal life with my academic thinking, was a host of fundamental questions about the ways late-twentieth-century American parents think about and organize their professional and private lives. Although the story told in Angles of Reflection is mine, I believe these issues confront many others as well, and I wanted to share.