Orfeo on 2017 student reading list

“Professors at America’s elite colleges pick one book every student should read in 2017,” Business Insider, Abby Jackson, December 22, 2016. James Berger of Yale University picks Orfeo.

“It is a story of music and genetics in our contemporary age of terror and surveillance. An idiosyncratic retelling of the Orpheus myth, an elderly avant garde composer who feels he has tried and exhausted every possible musical experiment, returns to his first love, biology, and seeks to inscribe a musical score onto the mutating DNA of bacteria. Yup.

“But his efforts are mistaken to be acts of bioterrorism, and so he flees into the ‘underworld’ of contemporary America, returning also to the various Euridices of his past. Amazing book —and you’ll learn a hell of a lot about music, science, politics … and even about Life!”

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