Searching for Habitable Worlds: Richard Powers, Winner of The Pulitzer Prize (#233)

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works
explore the effects of modern science and technology. His
novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book
Award for Fiction. He's won many other awards over the course
of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2021, Powers
has published 14 novels and has taught at the University of
Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. Powers’ latest book
is Bewilderment in which, 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?
Bewilderment on Amazon http://www.richardpowers.net Watch my most
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