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Zombies and Calculus by Colin Adams

2015; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2015.0263

1945-8134

Michael A. Morrison,

Education and Critical Thinking Development

The second half of the book is dominated by spiritual and religious struggle, desperation , anger, acceptance, insight, bitterness , love, confession, witness, and many more things, a complex and deeply moving collection of poems that must be read rather than described. Christian Wiman is a Christian who in fact believes, but who also argues with his belief and God himself . This last feature is an accepted practice in the Jewish tradition, and it adds a poignancy , authenticity, and deep humanity to these wrought utterances. It’s fitting to end with one fleeting vision of riding the El in the dark to work, “stapled to people, sweating hate,” where the speaker once “saw a grace of sparks / struck from the tracks / blast every residual individual dark / from every face turned to see it / vanish instantly into the air, / so fair it touched the roar with silence” (the last line quoting Edward Thomas). Fred Dings University of South Carolina Miscellaneous Colin Adams. Zombies and Calculus. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2014. isbn 9780691161907 Professor Williams’s math class is having a bad day. It’s the first week after spring break at bucolic Roberts College, and Williams is reviewing derivatives. As he scribbles diagrams on the blackboard, a late–arriving student shuffles into the classroom and proceeds to chew a chunk out of the neck of one student and bite the nose off another. In author Colin Adams’s conceit, Williams is writing a few months after the outbreak of zombification (“some janitor at Harvard tried to eat a freshman”). His goal? To “tell you how to use calculus to help you stay alive.” By chapter 2, in which characters use a differential equation to estimate the increase in the zombie population, it’s clear that Adams intends his hell-for-leather plot to be a skeleton he will flesh out with calculus lectures. He has previously used humor to enliven mathematics in two “streetwise guides” to calculus (1998 and 2001, with Joel Hass and Abigail Thompson). Here, amid battles, chases, and “assorted atrocities,” he deploys dry wit, academic satire, and knockabout slapstick to make these shenanigans (and the math) more palatable. But there is a problem. Repeatedly, Adams’s characters have to pause, no matter how dire their peril, to chat about calculus . Replete with diagrams and equations, these “conversations” typically cover several pages; many are extended in an appendix that constitutes almost half the book. Thus, after three hours of battling zombies in the college’s science center, Williams and biology prof Jessie Sullivan wind up trapped in a plastic port–a–potty near a construction site. Hunkered down in the adjacent toilet is Oscar Gunderson, Williams ’s academic rival and Jessie’s former lover. While zombies mill about outside, the three wrangle about their romantic entanglements . Then Williams notices a large scratch on Jessie’s leg, almost surely an indication of infection. This discovery initiates not an escape attempt but a calm discussion of elementary virology and epidemiology followed by a discourse on models of the growth of the “Z virus” in the brain. The latter plunges the characters (and the reader) into the heady realm of nonlinear differential equations. All this chitchat stops the story dead in its tracks for quite a while. (“I looked at my watch and realized we had been in the port-a-potty for six hours.”) Approached in the right spirit, Zombies and Calculus offers a lot of silly fun and lucid, if sometimes heavy, expositions of calculus. Readers seeking a more serious, Gareth Thomas A Welsh Dawn Y Lolfa Welsh writer Gareth Thomas has created a work praised by prominent authors, government officials, and respected academics. This historical novel, set in 1950s rural Wales, explores tensions between North and South, the Welshand English-speaking, and modern movement versus heritage preservation. Following a family through the country’s growing pains and economical/political shifts, Thomas offers a unique look at nationalism. Stitching Resistance: Women, Creativity, and Fiber Arts Marjorie Agosín, ed. Solis Press This essay collection demonstrates how meaningful art transcends the dark side of human nature. Telling a story with stitches—memories woven through thread, cloth, wool, and lace—artists use...