book info: on sale: now copy from: public library pages: 348 review written: 21.12.17 originally published: 2009 edition read: Penguin NAL 2009 title: Rooftops of Tehran author: Mahbod Seraji In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran's sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari's stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah's secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice... my thoughts: This book was first published in 2009 and I remember adding it to my list around that time but never actually reading it since I preferred checking out library books to ...
book info: on sale: now copy from: public library pages: 96 review written: 21.6.16 originally published: 2014 edition read: Riverhead Books, 2016, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre title: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics author: Carlo Rovelli Originally published in an Italian newspaper called Il Sole 24 Ore , this series of short lessons is compiled into a tiny book that covers the most interesting developments in physics since the twentieth century. The 7 lessons are: The Most Beautiful of Theories, Quanta, The Architecture of the Cosmos, Particles, Grains of Space, Probability, time, and the heat of black holes, and Ourselves. The author, Carlo Rovelli, is a theoretical physicist who is one of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory, which he explains "briefly" in one of the chapters. It is only when one truly understands a subject that one can condense it down to the most simple of explanations. Rovelli does just that in this orchestral non-textbook nove...
