After struggling through the first few chapters, I find that this book has appeal only to those readers who are strong-willed grandmothers, or those who always wanted to be so. Totally unrealistic, this book is a strong willed grandmother fantasy come true, but utterly irritating for those of us of the younger generations. Let me explain. This grandmother wears leather pants and is a snob in every way towards her very own granddaughter. The grandmother thinks that Manhattan is the center of the world, and that she is the only person that matters because she was once an actress. She cares more about herself than her own child and grandchild. Her granddaughter and her daughter are unrealistically wishy-washy, passive characters, and they accept their (grand)mother's never-ending bossiness without a second thought, without ever angering an iota. And it isn't as if the story were dealing with this problem, as a theme; it's just the 'backdrop'.

By chance, I found Mazel on the shelf of the tiny library of the small outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where I live. How it got there I have no idea. I found the first chapter or two almost impenetrable, which may perhaps be explained by the fact that - as I later learned - it's a sequel to an earlier novel. But the wit, charm and incisiveness of the style lured me on, and once I had sorted out the characters and got used to shuttling through time, I realized I had made a rare discovery. Everything felt so true. An obvious example: the way Sasha's egotism and theatricality had cowed and almost silenced her daughter and granddaughter, yet how they had quietly found their own forms of resistence and assertion. But many a novel and even soap opera can give you that. Far more remarkable was the way Goldstein brought to life the lost world and lost people of prewar Jewish Poland, and embodied in her characters the whole spectrum of ways people can and do respond to the sometimes impossibly difficult dilemmas and limitations into which they are born. You can see how each temperament and each generation arrives at what it thinks to be the best resolution, only to find itself outmoded. Most remarkable of all, I felt I understood considerably more about myself, the world, history, life, etc. when I had finished than when I had begun, and only a masterpiece can do that. Mazel is an extraordinary achievement, and what a pity that it should be out of print.

Mazel has illuminated much about Jewish History for me. But more than just being a fictional historical account of a line of Jewish Women, it is fiction at its finest. Goldstein's writing is quick, intelligent and at times funny. The way she works in definitions of the yiddish words she used is artful and educational, as well as entertaining. The narrative of Sasha's life is intermixed with folk tales and comments from the author. I HIGHLY recommend this book. I want more!

Either I'm the only reader who found this book disappointing, or -- and more likely -- folks are less inclined to spend their time writing negative reviews. Once again, Rebecca Goldstein has taken an entrancing concept and fallen down on the execution. The book has some lovely bits, but my major question throughout was Where oh where was her editor??? Not a terrible read, but don't pay full price.

This novel is about an intellectually insecure grad student who marries a famous genius mathematician, feeling her worth affirmed by his love and by the status conferred (explicit and subtle)upon her by being married to him. The marriage goes quickly sour as she realizes that an expansive mind is not incompatible with pettiness of spirit and human frailty. She sees only the genius and not the man. This novel is funny, and well-written but at the same time, it poses real questions and I think evidences a genuine human warmth. I think that it would not be an exxageration to say that I learned much from this book. You may as well (if nothing else, it's a good read)!

Ms. Goldstein is a gifted writer and she is well-versed in several, dashing, scientific fields that are close to the theory of everything, including general relativity, quantum physics, and mathematical epistemology. Alas, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gödel, three revered names whose thought cannot be used to form a complete sentence. They have left us, they have departed, and our predicament is that because of them, we neither know what time it is, nor in what place we are. Must genius be demonic? Or do we, the lesser souls, make it so for fear of losing our place in the minor world that we know. Ms. Goldstein entertains that subject, our praise and fear, and helps us in the familiar person of her heroine, Renee Feuer, and in the darkness of his genius, of Noam Himmel, the discoverer, at the age of twelve, of the "supernatural numbers." Feuer (or Erdman, if you like) and Himmel, like earth and sky. Some readers may find this book to be comical, but I don't have that sense of humor, and I hope that instead, this book may help us to regard the genius amongst us with more compassion, less fear, and greater utility. Moreover, the reader's investment is not for naught. Ms. Goldstein has books to follow, and her academic credentials suggest that there is some serious and concerted seeking going on that might help to lift us from our dilemma of time and space, or place, if nothing else.

Rebecca Goldstein's first book, "The Mind-Body Problem," is one of the funniest novels about the groves of academe, its pretenses and pettiness, but also about genius and fame. When it came out, we considered it a juicy game to trace some of the protagonists in the novel to real professors at Princeton. Goldstein won the "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. Her new book, "Properties of Light," unfortunately, is bad, very bad. It fails as a historical novel, it fails in its verbal art. (Although it got some rave reviews.)

The plot is contrived and full of unlikely coincidences. Young brilliant physicist, Justin Childs, meets physics professor Samual Mallach, formerly an Einstein protégé. Mallach once wrote a paper, now long forgotten, that was to revolutionize quantum theory. Justin meets Mallach and schemes to get that glorious past physics out of him. The old man has - you guessed it, a lovely daughter Dana, who is smart, recites poetry, loves her father, and knows physics. One of the villainous professors, Dietrich Spencer, has an ugly scar, and he is German, and he gets the Nobel prize that Mallach should have won. Mallach's talented daughter is not only a quantum physicist, she is beautiful and she was once married to a physics professor Justin knew, and she knows Tantric love techniques - yeah, right. The figure of Professor Mallach (Hebrew for angel) is inspired by David Bohm, one of the proponents of the "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics that strives to save modern physics from giving up "reality" as we know it in favor of a probabilistic interpretation based on Schrodinger's psi-function.

The novel is loaded with gobs of perfumed language that smacks of Romance novels. Page 24 has the profound, "Do we believe in souls, Justin?" And then follows a Danielle Steel passage, "Slowly, they had come apart from each other. He had watched their bodies separating as she had lifted herself away from him ... They had bodies that were narrow and very white." On page 198, "And ravished still, to see her eyelids shiver over dreams." This phrase appears earlier on page 64 as "... with eyelids shivering over frightened dreams." And on the same page, "I watched her eyelids shiver over her dreams." On page 181: "In her eyes there was an articulation of terror so stark it seemed that of a very small child." On page 55, an overdone l-alliteration, "Lines of light and lines of longing, passing through me, un observable, a thing that longs." On page 76 a Salomon song-like passage of ecstasy: "She had a look both serious and not, ...softly parting lips ... softly opening mouth ... Dana divine and taking me in, her body arched upward like a flame above my own, fierce at one moment, tender at the next, her tenderness was the most terrible aspect of it all, I did not know if I would emerge from it at all." The words beautiful and beauty appear far too often, about 35 times in the book, as in "she was beautiful." Show me beauty, don't just say it is so. On page 40, for instance, we read that Justin "had arrived at some mathematically beautiful results, for his affinity with beauty was strong, because he came to beauty by way of his mother. - What do you study? - Beauty. - What shall I study? - The same." And on page 72: "- The solution would have to be very deep, and I know it would be very beautiful. I can't see the form it will take yet, but I know it would be very beautiful."

Then there are meaningless repetitions, as on page 63, "I am awash, I am awash, for it is Dana's room, Dana's room, Justin Childs is in Dana's room, and I am Justin Childs." Please! There's lots of names dropping: poets Blake, Proust, Yeats. Physicists: Einstein, Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, Dirac, Bohr, even God.

The science doesn't work well, either. Bohm was not the unrecognized genius everybody wanted to destroy because he argued against die Copenhagians Heisenberg and, Bohr. His papers in the early Fifties were taken seriously and discussed at length. He was able to explain the larger picture behind his ideas in a 1957 booklet, "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics," a remarkable work I got for 85 cents in 1974. His physics just didn't work. First there was von Neumann's refutation of "hidden variables," then Bell's inequalities killed them for good - or at least for now. Goldstein's assessment in her Afterward, "For various reasons, none of them good, the formulation - and David Bohm - were dismissed," is simply untrue.

I ran out and bought this book right after reading Daniel Mendelson's effusively glowing review in New York Magazine. I figured that any book that could make that notoriously hardened critic "burst into tears" with its sheer beauty and brilliance had to be worth taking the afternoon off for. And, boy, was I right. Goldstein's prose is so luminously hypnotic, her characters so sympathetically rendered, and the story so engrossingly original that the only breaks I took from reading were a few brief moments when I simply had to put the book down and catch my breath. Though the book intimately involves some of the biggest ideas in science (specifically, the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with Einstein's Relativity Theory) Goldstein makes these go down easy by wrapping them inside a mesmerizing and multi-tiered love story. In my case at least, this resulted in the somewhat exhilerating experience of realizing that I'd just gained a whole lot of knowledge when all I thought I was doing was indulging my lust for great fiction. This is the first book of Goldstein's that I've read (though I've been meaning to read her ever since she won a Macarthur Grant in 1996), but if this book is representative of her work in general I can't wait to read the rest!

I just finished my dissertation (in physics) and was looking to relax by reading some fiction. A friend suggested that Properties of Light might be a nice transition from the straight physics. Is it just that it's been so long since I've read a novel, or is this book pure bliss? I enjoyed every last bit of it, and was particularly surprised by how accurate her presentation of the physics involved was. I must admit that I have been interested in the physicist David Bohm (whom the character of Mallach is inspired by) and his mysteriously ignored interpretation of quantum mechanics since my undergraduate days, and have always thought it would make a good novel. There are so many deep questions here: why wouldn't the scientific community want to adopt a theory that seems like such a better candidate for the truth? How could it be that scientists seem so to prefer the mysterious and ineffable, to the straightforward and easily explained? Though Goldstein is careful to point out that the character Mallach is very different from Bohm in many ways and the dramatic twists and turns of her book are entirely fictional, Mallach's physics is nearly the same as Bohm's and she manages to get to the core of the real-life physics story, and deal with these deep questions, in an incredibly skillful way.