RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksI found Holt’s essay on the Riemann hypothesis to be totally charming. In fact, this was my experience for nearly the whole book. In piece after piece, Holt acts as a model host, giving us only the best bits while paring away most difficulties. As he notes in the preface, \'My ideal is the cocktail-party chat: getting across a profound idea in a brisk and amusing way to an interested friend by stripping it down to its essence (perhaps with a few swift pencil strokes on a napkin).\' When Einstein Walked with Gödel mostly delivers on this goal. It’s a perfect bedtime book, with each essay providing a luminous devotional on weighty topics, delivered with a light touch ... Jim Holt...cement[s] his reputation as one of the few pop-science practitioners whose primary aim is aesthetic bliss. Beauty and truth are only loosely conjoined ... he reveres abstract ideas but not their human vessels, and part of his originality lies in how he accepts (and amplifies) the distinction. Holt may be an anti-Platonist, but he seems glad to visit the world of ideal forms. So long as he searches these heights for specimens, I’ll be excited to see what he brings back next.
