Richard Powers. (2021). Bewilderment: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.

Richard Powers. 2021. Bewilderment: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.

Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Richard Powers. Bewilderment: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

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1. • value: activism
2. • value: Special Needs
3. • value: Son
4. • value: grief
5. • value: Climate change
6. • value: Astrobiology
7. • value: parent
8. • value: single father
9. • value: widow
10. • value: Booker Prize shortlist
11. • value: oprahs book club
12. • value: neurodivergent
13. • value: clifi
14. • value: Neurotherapy
15. • value: Greta Thunberg
16. • value: decnef
17. • value: decoded neurofeedback

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Powers, Richard
   • bioText: Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
   • name: Richard Powers

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2021-09-21T00:00:00-04:00

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Bewilderment

fullDescription

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain...

With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Oprah Winfrey
   • content: Richard Powers is one of our country's greatest living writers. He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Tracy K. Smith, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
   • content: Extraordinary....Powers's insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Heller McAlpin;NPR
   • content: A heartrending tale of loss....Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Rob Merrill;Associated Press
   • content: [A]stounding....a must-read novel....It's urgent and profound and takes readers on a unique journey that will leave them questioning what we're doing to the only planet we have.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Dale Singer;St. Louis Post-Dispatch
   • content: As in The Overstory, Powers seamlessly yet indelibly melds science and humanity, hope and despair.
6. • premium: False
   • source: David Laskin;Seattle Times
   • content: Bewilderment is a big book about what matters most....a brilliant, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking book.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Ron Charles;Washington Post
   • content: [P]oignant...Bewilderment is a cri de coeur....this is a hauntingly intimate story set within the privacy of one family trapped in the penumbra of mourning.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Ezra Klein;The Ezra Klein Show
   • content: You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit.... It is enchanting, and it is devastating.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Caleb Scharf;Nautilus
   • content: Immersive and astonishing....Powers captures the tragedy of a species that could, but perhaps won't, become a lasting part of a cosmic menagerie. But in this absorbing and effortlessly readable tale he seems to have also found uplifting poetry in our despair.
10. • premium: False
    • source: The New Yorker
    • content: A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of 'invisible suffering on unimaginable scales.
11. • premium: False
    • source: John Domini;The Brooklyn Rail
    • content: In Bewilderment, [Powers's] mastery strikes a new vein....it raises goosebumps and breaks our hearts.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Bethanne Patrick;Washington Post
    • content: Achingly current and wise.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Alexandra Alter;New York Times
    • content: [Powers] wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live.
14. • premium: False
    • source: Rob Doyle;The Guardian
    • content: Remarkable.... Bewilderment channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac.
15. • premium: False
    • source: Alexander C. Kafka;Boston Globe
    • content: One of America's most ambitious and imaginative novelists.... In a year of unprecedented worldwide drought, fire, and flooding, [Bewilderment] couldn't be timelier.... Whether concerning family or nature, this heart-rending tale warns us to take nothing for granted.
16. • premium: False
    • source: Ellen Atkins;Minneapolis Star Tribune
    • content: The tenderness between father and son seem[s] so real and heartfelt that the novel becomes its own empathy machine. What's more powerful, though, is how the emotions Bewilderment evokes expand far beyond the bond of father and son to embrace the living world.
17. • premium: False
    • source: David Yaffe;Air Mail
    • content: Powers [has] an emotional core to everything he writes, and this sets him apart from nearly everyone.
18. • premium: False
    • source: Gish Jen;The New Republic
    • content: An unabashed tearjerker.... The most moving and inspiring of all Powers's books.
19. • premium: False
    • source: Carolyn Kellogg;Los Angeles Times
    • content: Intimate....Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change.
20. • premium: False
    • source: The Economist
    • content: Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality.
21. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      July 26, 2021
      Pulitzer winner Powers (The Overstory) offers up a marvelous story of experimental neurotherapy and speculations about alien life. Astrophysicist Theo Byrne simulates worlds outside Earth’s solar system as part of lobbying efforts for a new spaceborne telescope. As a single parent in Madison, Wis., his work takes a back seat—his wife, Aly, mother of their nine-year-old, Robin, died two years earlier. Theo shares his fictional descriptions of life on exoplanets with Robin in the form of bedtime stories, and they bond over a Trumpian administration’s hostility to scientific research. Theo allows Robin to protest neglect of endangered species at the state capitol, despite Robin’s volatile behavior. He’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s, OCD, and ADHD, and Theo refuses to give him psychoactive medication (“Life is something we need to stop correcting,” goes Theo’s new “crackpot theory”). More cutting-edge is the neurofeedback program run by an old friend of Aly’s, who trains Robin to model his emotions from a record saved of Aly’s brain activity. It works, for a while—the tragic, bittersweet plot has some parallels to Flowers to Algernon. The planetary descriptions grow a bit repetitive and don’t gain narrative traction, but in the end, Powers transforms the wrenching story into something sublime. Though it’s not his masterpiece, it shows the work of a master.

22. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 1, 2021
      

      Theo Byrne, a widowed astrobiologist who imagines life on other planets, is brought down to earth by his son Robin, whose irascibility and erratic moods are driving school authorities to distraction. Theo's only recourse is to put his own work aside and make Robin the center of his universe. The Byrnes' one remaining vestige of Robin's late mother is a brain scan, recorded years before in an experiment. Here is where Powers's story intersects with Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon. Robin undergoes a form of behavior modification called decoded neurofeedback treatment, using his mother's brain scan. He improves at first, but then becomes fascinated with the natural world, captivated to the point of overzealousness, leading to the erosion of hard-won progress. And as Robin's emotional state reaches a state of relative equilibrium, Theo seems to take on some of the characteristics Robin has left behind, even to the point of openly criticizing the psychologist trying to help his son. VERDICT Writing with the same remarkable attention to detail found in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory, Powers has created a world and characters that will suck readers in and keep them fixed until the literally bitter end.--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

23. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from July 15, 2021
      A widower pursues an unusual form of neurological therapy for his son in this affecting story. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne, 45, looks for life in outer space while his 9-year-old son, Robin, seeks to protect endangered animals on Earth. Both are still grieving for the boy's mother, Alyssa, an animal rights activist who died in a car accident two years ago as she swerved to avoid hitting an opossum. Since then, Robin has been subject to tantrums and violence and variously diagnosed with Asperger's, OCD, and ADHD. Theo has resisted medication and turns to a university colleague who is experimenting with a neurological therapy. Powers has followed his awarding-winning, bestselling The Overstory (2018), a busy eco-epic featuring nine main characters, with this taut ecological parable borne by a small cast. It's a darker tale, starting with an author's note about Flowers for Algernon and continuing through Robin's emotional maelstrom, Theo's parental terrors, and, not far in the background, environmental and political challenges under a Trump-like president. Yet there are also shared moments of wonder and joy for a father and son attuned to science and nature and each other, as well as flashbacks that make Alyssa a vibrant presence. The empathy that holds this nuclear family together also informs Robin's ceaseless concern and efforts on behalf of threatened species, just as the absence of empathy fuels the threat. As always, there's a danger of preachiness in such stories. Powers generally avoids it by nurturing empathy for Robin. While the boy's obsession with the fate of the planet's nonhuman life can seem like religious fervor, it has none of the cant or self-interest. He is himself a rare and endangered species. A touching novel that offers a vital message with uncommon sympathy and intelligence.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

24. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 1, 2021
      Powers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018), focuses his new, intimate novel on loneliness, tragedy, and love for life and family. Theo, an astrobiologist, and his sensitive nine-year-old son, Robin, who has a keen interest in nature, struggle to adapt following the unexpected death of spirited wife and mother Aly. When Robin has a fit of rage at school, Theo realizes he must seek treatment. Opposed to pharmacological intervention, he enrolls Robin in an experimental therapy, known as decoded neurofeedback, which matches brain-pattern activity to a model brain print from another individual. The other individual in Robin's case? Aly, his deceased mother. As therapy progresses, Robin transforms, perceiving biodiversity with fresh insights, wonder, and fascination. He is happier, more inquisitive, and even motivated to fight for environmental change amid the inexorable ecological doom all around him. But will these surprisingly positive outcomes persist? With soaring descriptions and forthright observations about our planet and the life it supports, Bewilderment is centered on a devoted father-and-son relationship, but it also offers rich commentary on the complex, often mystifying intersections between science, popular culture, and politics. In the end, Theo, who searches for alien life in remote outposts of the universe, may make his most profound discovery, together with his son, much closer to home. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: As the best-selling The Overstory continues to reverberate, readers will be excited to turn to another deeply involving Powers novel.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of...

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1. • source: The Booker Prize Foundation
   • value: Man Booker Prize for Fiction Nominee

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A Novel

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W. W. Norton & Company

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2. • code: FIC037000
   • description: Fiction / Political
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General