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The Housekeeper + The Professor (2010)

by Yōko Ogawa(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0099521342 (ISBN13: 9780099521341)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Vintage

review 1: The Housekeeper and the Professor is a short but sweet novelette about a housekeeper who gets assigned to an unusual client — a former mathematics professor who’s short-term memory only lasts for 80 minutes. A novel concept which presents unusual challenges!Yes there is some math in this book, but it’s presented lovingly in small doses, and is both fun and mind-expanding. Primes, perfect and amicable numbers all appear, as do a couple of famous formulas and conjectures. Math however is only one subtext. Japanese baseball is another. I learned a lot about the Hanshen Tigers, not to mention former ace Enatsu Yutaka.At root this book is about friendship. It’s a fairly quick and easy read, that goes down good and leaves warm feelings without being sappy. A perfe... morect winter read.
review 2: Quite simply this book moved me to tears several times although I can't quite explain why. I guess as a math teacher the simple joy and beauty of the numbers themselves is part of it, but the bigger part is the relationships in the book. The professor is a wonderful human for whom life is so utterly fragile and unfair. He deserves a much better fate than the loss of memory and yet, it makes each moment so unbelievably precious. Root and his mother are wonderful people who can cherish what the professor has to offer and his life brought depth of understanding to them about not only numbers, but the joy of curiosity and peacefulness. I am sure I will read this again and I will certainly recommend it highly to every one that I meet! This is a gem of a book, please read it! less

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