substantive amalgam of math and fiction might enjoy the math-based murder mysteries The Parrot’s Theorem, by Denis Guedj (2000), and The Oxford Murders, by Guillermo Martínez (2005), and the fictionalized biographies The French Mathematician, by Tom Petsinis (1997), and The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt (2007). Amazingly, Adams’s is not the only guide to using math to ride out a zombie attack. An earlier book by Jennifer Ouellette covers calculus with less intensive pedagogy but wider applications: The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse (2010). Go figure. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Sergey Gandlevsky. Trepanation of the Skull. Susanne Fusso, tr. DeKalb, Illinois. Northern Illinois University Press. 2014. isbn 9780875807157 Nearly all the recognizable elements of Russian literature can be found within the pages of Sergey Gandlevsky’s autobiographical novel, Trepanation of the Skull— dangerous amounts of vodka, Pushkin, a duel (of sorts), doses of superstition, pathos, cynicism, pessimism, fatalism, byzantine bureaucracy, and, most profoundly, the struggle to reconcile unjustified suffering with an omnipotent god. Gandlevsky calls Trepanation of the Skull “a tale,” which is one of the many clues to the reader that although autobiographical, truth will be secondary to artistic expression . As one of Russia’s most respected contemporary poets, this preference is not surprising. Gandlevsky promises “to delight you with prose. Poetic prose. Don’t expect a plot—it’s this and that, the dark passages of murky associations. A mass of allusions.” That the poetry of his prose resonates in translation is a tribute to Susanne Fusso’s mastery of both modern, colloquial Russian and Gandlevsky’s milieu. The aesthetic style enlivens the narrative’s regard for the mundane—dressing the kids, getting drunk with friends, spending time at the dacha, arguing about expenses—making the ordinary interesting in a manner reminiscent of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s popular tetralogy, My Struggle. Whenheisinhisearlyforties,Gandlevsky begins to have difficulty formulating words. This disability, along with persistent, severe headaches, leads eventually to a brain tumor diagnosis. For a time Gandlevsky’s art, his profession, and even his life are in jeopardy. Successful surgery removes the tumor and gives him a reprieve from death. But will the grace granted, his “second chance,” be transformative? Will he be able to overcome the pitfalls that have shadowed his life, the complacency, the alcoholism? Does he have the fortitude to reconcile his actions to his aspirations, to become a better, wiser person? Or is he too weak to change, undeserving of the second chance deprived others more worthy? Gandlevsky’s unsatisfied questions compel us to look inward, to examine whether if, given a second chance, we would have the discipline and moral strength to redeem ourselves. Lori Feathers Dallas, Texas Jane Hirshfield. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. New York. Knopf. 2015. isbn 9780385351058 Poet Jane Hirshfield, a passionate advocate and resourceful explicator of poetry, evokes the “mysterious quickening [that] inhabits the depths of any good poem” in this brilliant collection. Her essays ask “How do poems—how does art—work? Under that question, inevitably, is another: How do we?” Admitting that it cannot be answered, she has searched thirty years for ways to approach “a destination whose center cannot ever be mapped or reached.” All ten essays are probing and insightful , several deeply illuminating. In “Language Wakes up in the Morning,” Hirshfield discusses the etymologies of image and statement, the foundational “modes of attention and their prolific offspring,” then reaches the concept of musing: “no accident , that word used to describe the ways in which thought’s more fluid transformations occur.” She considers the nine muses, interprets “The Stillness of the World Before Bach,” by Lars Gustafsson, and “Music’s self-aware re-orderings,” which “bring experience out of randomness and into the arc of shaping direction,” as it is contrasted “not to silence but to ‘noise.’” Hirshfield makes a convincing case for the artist’s life not being the source but the servant of a poem. In reading Czesław Miłosz’s “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” she notes that “the Polish language and the condition of exile can be read as addressing...