Language That God Talks
On Science and Religion
Herman Wouk
Read by Bob Walter

Hachette Audio
April 2010/ ISBN
978-1-60788-181-0
Nonfiction / Spirituality/Science
Amazon

Reviewed by Chris Querry

tI have been a fan of Herman Wouk since I read Marjorie Morningstar when I was a teenager. Then came War and Remembrance and The Winds of War. I was a bit reluctant to take on the five CD, five hour audio version of The Language That God Talks. You see, Wouk has a unique literary style that puts almost every detail into a languihing description. Languishing, here, is a very good thing. It's what makes Southern writers Southern (though Wouk is from the Bronx). It's what takes the mundane and makes it eternal. It's what transforms the ugly into beautiful. And Herman Wouk can do that, but could he do it in an audio book without sounding pretentious and do it in such a way to make calculus, the language that God talks, more than understandable but beautiful. The answer is yes, he can and he has done it.

I know of Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, the Socrates to Wouk's Plato. I've seen video of him pulling the infamous o-ring from the ice water in the Congressional hearings of the Challenger disaster. I've heard his rather plain and drab speech, but to hear his quandaries transformed by Wouk into beautiful, significant speech makes the listener want to pause his machine at every sentence. I know I've spoken more of how Wouk writes rather than what he writes, but there isn't room to deal with that adequately. There isn't room to deal adequately with how he writes. Just let it be said this is a journey I will take again and again until I feel, even know, I understand Wouk and Feynman and the calculus God talks. The language that God talks, Wouk argues, is the language that mends together religion and science into a cohesive and reciprocating view of the cosmos that is fully explained by neither science nor religious dogma independently. Raised as an orthodox Jew, Wouk's cosmology fell short of explaining his and our lifelong existential inquiries. So, too, was the case with Feynman, a physicist steeped in scientific tradition. Scientific tradition seeks facts. Religious dogma seeks faith. But, as Wouk discovers, the fact of faith is truly the language that God talks.

Reviewer's Note: Unabridged Audiobook 5 CDs / 5 HRs