In contrast to so much scholarly work today, McCarthy's latest book is a refreshing and welcome alternative. It also provides a model of what the academy might well seek to emulate. Eschewing already clichéd, in-vogue topics, not to mention second-rate texts as his subjects of study, McCarthy takes on major works and big questions. As a result, his new study is exceedingly ambitious, large in scope and strategically complex. John McCarthy offers an unusual conceptual framework quite different from typical disciplinary fare, but that is what makes this book especially worth reading and thinking about.

With this volume, McCarthy attempts to span the enduring divide between the natural sciences and the humanities. Or in terms long familiar to Germanists, he re-aligns and links the worlds of Natur and Geist in a new and valuable way. Not only has he brought together such seemingly disparate fields as physics and literature, he also spans the centuries of modern scientific and literary thought. McCarthy's ability to reach across and connect such expanses proves both useful and instructive. While Goethe, Nietzsche, and Grass constitute his literary focal points, his discussions also bring Cusanus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Breitinger, Wieland, and Kant into play. In similar fashion, his scientific focus extends beyond an introduction and explanation of chaos and complexity theory to include in the considerations such luminaries as Copernicus, Galileo, Poincaré, Penrose, Prigogine/Stengers, Bohm/Peat, Schrödinger, and E. O. Wilson, to name only a few. McCarthy's reach extends back to the Enlightenment and renaissance humanism through all the intervening years up into the present, making connections all along the way. His book is a work of remarkable erudition.

In the first part of the study, McCarthy so to speak establishes his scientific credentials. He may be a literary scholar, but he also knows his science and speaks knowledgeably about modern physics in particular. His expertise is not simply limited to the history of science, for he lays out the actual physics much as Brian Greene does in his books about superstring theory. This undertaking is consequently not for the faint-hearted, as it places demands on its readers and may even require them to venture into uncharted territory truly foreign to literary scholars. The rewards are worth the efforts, however.