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Title: The Scientists

Subtitle: A Family Romance

Author: Marco Roth

Narrator: Michael Goldstrom

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-18-12

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 7 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

This is a frank, intelligent, and deeply moving debut memoir.

With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician - from the time he could get his toddler tongue to pronounce deoxyribonucleic acid, or recite a French poem - Marco Roth was able to share his parents New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that hadinfected him in the early 1980s.

What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways.The Scientistsis a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; its a story of how growing up quickly can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other peoples. A memoir of parents and children in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley,The Scientistsgrapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance in a style that is both elegiac and defiant.

Marco Roth was raised amid the vanished liberal culture of Manhattans Upper West Side. After studying comparative literature at Columbia and Yale, he helped found the magazine n+1 in 2004. Recipient of the 2011 Shattuck Prize for literary criticism, he lives in Philadelphia.

Critic Reviews:

Marco Roth emerged from his privileged NYC childhood like one of Salingers precocious Glass children, but Roths family was ravaged by secrets, and from it he has written a gorgeous memoir no one will be able to put downpsychologically adroit, precise, moving, one of the best memoirs Ive read in years. (Mary Karr,

New York Timesbest-selling author)

This is the first intellectual autobiography that Ive read by someone our age in the searching, nineteenth-century tradition of Edmund Gosse or Henry Adams: the autobiography equally of a reader and of a son, grappling with an inheritance that is both intellectual and emotionalan education for our times. (Lorin Stein, editor,

Paris Review)

[A] powerfully forlorn debut memoirRoths work is a ferocious literary exercise in rage, despair, and artistic self-invention. (

Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

A memoir for readers suspicious of memoirs

This is an extremely powerful, haunting first work. It steers clear of the many temptations and false consolations of the memoir: to make linear and precise what in memory is always twisted and vague; to take one's own reconstructed account for the truth; and to slip into that false religion which holds that to articulate one's own life, say "one's own truth," somehow redeems that life. Though written by a literary critic with an extremely literary sensibility, The Scientists is highly scientific in method: Every conclusion is tentative and subject to revision, and it never allows a hypothesis to pass without challenging it with inconvenient facts. We close the book with no single working theory that accounts for why Marco Roth is who he is, why his father was who he was, and why his mother stood by. Instead, we come to share Roth's many struggles, over many years, to come to answer these questions, to puzzle out, in the shadow of his father's ghost, his own failings and fortunes.