Rating: 
Summary: Finally!--a thinking man's hero
Review: A great break from frilly, over-written fiction, this book is beautifully written and wonderfully imaginative. Benito is a real charcter--finally someone that the intelligent portion of the population can identify with. I liked it very much and plan to read it again.
Rating: 
Summary: Science Makes Sense, but Life Does Not.
Review: Alan Lightman has written a series of vignettes about the passage of an idealistic youth into not-very-rewarding adulthood. Although Benito (as his best friend John dubbed him) has success in theoretical science, it is not matched when it comes to his personal encounters later in life, where relentless bad fortune is visited upon him as he grows older. Possibly because I grew up similarly in the warm grasp of science, I thoroughly enjoyed Bennett's childhood experiences and his close friendship with John, who shared his interests. Later, Bennito was most at home in the detached world of mathematics, where a clean sheet of white paper and a pencil opened the magical doors to his creativity. He naturally was led to a career in science, which provided him with all the satisfactions and rewards he seemed to need. But it did not prepare him to share his life with other people. Nor did his meager interactions with his parents, particularly his father, give him a good foundation for life. Lightman suggests that to be successful in physics, one must be obsessed by it until age forty. Benito was. And it paid off careerwise. But there is still the last half of one's life to be lived. Benito found a wife, a beautifully sensitive creature, but she was not really meant for this world. Their relationship developed promisingly at first. But then what happened? What makes people act in self-destructive ways? A lack of preparation in youth, perhaps. But whose fault, or responsibility, is it? I liked this book mostly for its insights into the creative process. In describing Bennett's brilliant teacher Davis, Lightman wrote: "...It seemed to Bennett that Davis took more pleasure in being wrong [about scientific problems] than in being right. When he was wrong, he learned something new." Ultimately, however, Bennett's story left me with an inner vacant feeling, almost as if I had witnessed the sacrifice of an beautiful idealistic youth upon the altar of science.
Rating:
Summary: Short breezy novel. Enjoyably read, and quickly forgotten.
Review: Alan Lightman's Good Benito brilliantly tells the story of Bennett Lang; a story that is greatly augmented by Lightman's use of a non-linear storyline. Through the glimpses into Bennett's life, the reader is able to closely relate to the triumphs, confusions, and heartbreaks that shape Benito. The author brilliantly uses simple sentence structure in describing difficult subject matter, from high level physics to the depths of human emotion, to allow the reader an enormous sense of clarity in reading the novel. A must read for anyone who suffers a need for control bordering on the psychotic.
Rating:
Summary: Great Benito
Review: Alan Lightman's Good Benito brilliantly tells the story of Bennett Lang; a story that is greatly augmented by Lightman's use of a non-linear storyline. Through the glimpses into Bennett's life, the reader is able to closely relate to the triumphs, confusions, and heartbreaks that shape Benito. The author brilliantly uses simple sentence structure in describing difficult subject matter, from high level physics to the depths of human emotion, to allow the reader an enormous sense of clarity in reading the novel. A must read for anyone who suffers a need for control bordering on the psychotic.
Rating:
Summary: Short breezy novel. Enjoyably read, and quickly forgotten.
Review: Although bery much different from the vignettes of Einstein's Dream, Alan Lightman's breezy and poetic voice is instantly recognizable. A self-referential story of a young man's struggles with love, physics, and coming of age, the novel is short and well-written. It sweeps through your mind and you are left with a smile, but the experience is not nearly as memorable as Einstein's Dreams. The human conflicts and stories are not particularly poignant, but Lightman is fascinating in his portrayal of an eccentric physicist and the trials that a budding young physicist must endure. As a physicist from MIT with an exceptional gift for writing, Lightman seems to lack the perceptive depth to take on complex human relationships but his depiction of the world of physics is truly worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: The Benito is a superpartner to Einstein's Dreams
Review: Good Benito seems to have been somehow overlooked amid the attention to other Alan Lightman greats like Einstein's Dreams and The Diagnosis. That's unfortunate, since Benito shares equally with those two books in its ability to linger and continue growing larger in your mind long after reading it. This one has the curious twist of centering on an alter ego of the author, as with Orson Scott Card's "Lost Boys," with parallels eerily close enough to make you wonder how much or how little the author is taking liberties with biographical experiences. To see for yourself, compare fictional Bennett Long's breakthrough in globular cluster dynamics in Benito, with real-life Alan Lightman's breakthrough in globular cluster dynamics in the Review of Modern Physics (Volume 50, page 437, published 1978). As such, the novel stands as much a creative quasi-autobiography as an apological defense for leaving a profession in physics. For Bennett strives constantly for a rational universe capable of becoming well-understood. But while his study of physics delightfully rewards this instinct, the vicissitudes of human life and the mysteries of human behavior are far more ambiguous and troubling. This plays out almost in a series of vignettes not unlike Einstein's Dreams in structure, with serial encounters and comraderies punctuated by modernist episodes of detail-laden solitude. A pot-smoking MIT roommate, a brilliant but estranged childhood friend, a gambling-addicted uncle, a compassionate nanny, and a harried astronomer, among others, all puzzle Bennett with their irrational motivations. The novel is book-ended by the most notable subjects: the last is a beautiful and talented but implacably narcissist lover, while it begins with the most incomprehensible of all possible crazies in Bennett's world: a great physicist devoid of ego. The cumulative exploration of the limits of human reason is tied up nicely at the conclusion, wherein Bennett and his nephew float on a fishing boat amid an incoming fog and test their reactions to feeling lost in the blank shroud of human existence. Lightman's writing style conveys profound insight with sparse dialogue offset by revealing details of action and form. The questions it raises are subtle to the point of seeming to arise spontaneously in the reader's mind. An obliquely haunting story.
Rating:
Summary: A fine book. Worth reading
Review: I don't agree with some of the reviewers below. I don't think this book was written with the intention of depicting the main character, Bennett ("Good Benito"), as a rational man struggling with the irrational behavior in this world. I think it is about an obsessed, knowledge-seeker, curious and candid man struggling with his own solitude. But anyway, that's my opionion and guess. My recommendation is for you to buy it; it is a nice piece of literature. It has almost no physics or math, only the necessary to mold a credible character.
Rating:
Summary: A fine book. Worth reading
Review: I don't agree with some of the reviewers below. I don't think this book was written with the intention to depict the main character, Bennett ("Good Benito"), as a rational man struggling with the irrational behavior in this world. I think it is about an obsessed, knowledge-seeker, curious and candid man struggling with his own solitude. But anyway, that's my opionion and guess. My recommendation is for you to buy it; it is a nice piece of literature. It has almost no physics or math, only the necessary to mold a credible character.
Rating:
Summary: A fine book. Worth reading
Review: I don't agree with some of the reviewers below. I don't think this book was written with the intention to depict the main character, Bennett ("Good Benito"), as a rational man struggling with the irrational behavior in this world. I think it is about an obsessed, knowledge-seeker, curious and candid man struggling with his own solitude. But anyway, that's my opionion and guess. My recommendation is for you to buy it; it is a nice piece of literature. It has almost no physics or math, only the necessary to mold a credible character.
Rating:
Summary: Almost Great Benito
Review: I loved the character descriptions and the constant thread running through the novel. Alan Lightman's style, written in the first person, is precise and void of overly descriptive confusion. Benito too is void of overly emotional descriptions, yet his personal softer side still emanates. I loved the book and love Alan Lightman's style.
The novel as it nears completion does however slightly fade into nothingness, my view perhaps because of my pedantic reasoning. I therefore gave four stars as opposed to five stars. Despite this, the novel in its entirety is brilliant and I highly recommend it.
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