Featuring full color illustrations from Sayre’s Flatland, this video book trailer for Flatland’s companion piece, The Flatland Dialogues, explores themes of love, entropy, and more.
San Francisco Book Review of Flatland!
Flatland
“This picture book is not related to the novella Flatland by Edwin Abbott (1884), other than both are occupied by characters who are geometric shapes. The novella Flatland satirized a society split into rigid classes. The picture book Flatland deals subtly with the mature themes of relationships, death, and spirituality.
The protagonist Owuza arrives in Flatland as a speck, and gradually grows into a fully realized being. He makes friends, shares his ideas, creates beautiful things with them, and learns to love. Then, without warning, Owuza is gone. His friends look all over for him, and find him in an unexpected place.
Fans of Rebecca Emberley’s artwork will recognize the effective design of colorful scenes (as if from roughly cut pieces of construction paper) from her earlier books, like Chicken Little and There Was an Old Monster.
Flatland is a touching tale that can be enjoyed by both kids and adults. It won a “Recommended” badge from the Parents’ Choice Foundation. The publisher, Two Little Birds, a small hybrid press co-founded by illustrator Emberley, admirably donates a book to a child for every book they sell.”
Henry Hertz, San Francisco Book Review
Kirkus Review of Something There Is
Something There Is:
Seeking a Rational Faith for Our Children
In this well-written collection of essays styled as letters to his children and grandchildren, an engineer, businessman and father makes his case for “a rational faith.”
Sayre is a man of faith, but not in the traditional religious sense. Rather, the objects of his devotion are truth, freedom, communication and organization. Sayre penned his essays at a variety of venues—a hospital, a prison, MIT, etc.—and weaves his writings around them. His philosophical musings are a pleasure to read, whether he’s visiting a school for the mentally challenged or admiring the architecture of Gloucester Cathedral. In fresh and appealing prose, he describes communication, for instance, as “our means of conveying truth and sharing beauty; it is the infrastructure of love.” Readers might naturally want to know if the author believes in God, and Sayre takes his sweet time getting there; finally, he explains his view—“I recognize that there are millions whose answer lies in their belief in a creative God. I hope they will forgive my inability to accept such a hypothesis without question”—while questioning the traditional God who “allows vast injustice to prevail.” Sayre’s deep commitment to reason appears on nearly every page; sometimes, though, it would be nice to see him lighten up more, especially in parts of the book related to family. Fortunately, Sayre’s dry wit pops up every now and again, and he admits, for example, that he got nervous auditioning for a spot in a quartet and, as he says, his self-improvement efforts at the gym leave something to be desired. He veers into his more technical language only briefly, yet overall, Sayre thinks and writes so carefully about philosophical issues that readers who don’t share his beliefs may find themselves as inspired as those who do.
Thoughtful, elegantly written essays for philosophical ponderers.
Foreword Review, featured in the Fall 2014 issue
Something There Is:
Seeking a Rational Faith for Our Children
Reviewed by Kristine Morris
August 27, 2014
In his brief, thoughtful essays in Something There Is, David Sayre, an engineer who has led advances in communication and energy technologies for thirty years, speaks about the encounters he has had with people all over the world who are longing for a rational faith. Intended to be letters to his children, and written from diverse and often conflicted locations, Sayre’s poetic musings express the highly relatable need to believe in something greater than ourselves, and to do so without having to set our rational minds on the back burner.
Despite the fear that “advancing knowledge threatens what we hold sacred, that solving mysteries reduces the realm of beauty, that faith and love cannot be rational, that our sense of the holy may be obsolescent in a world of technology,” the author finds the opposite to be true: “The science that enshrines a commitment to truth reveals the deepest beauties, finding order in places that were unknown or thought to be chaotic,” he writes. “Many who have devoted their lives to science testify to their sense of awe at the great beauty that lies at the heart of nature. … The experiences of order, of symmetry, of finding deep and hidden relationships, of consistent metaphors and analogies—all are deeply scientific, as well as beautiful.”
Sayre expresses confidence that the discoveries of science are consistent with the central teachings of the world’s great religions, as well as with those of the best in art and literature. He eloquently traces the evolution of societies from the primitive to the mature: “A primitive society forms exclusive, secret and defensive groups; a mature civilization seeks an inclusive community,” he writes. “A primitive society hides in shelter from a feared environment, and exploits what it can; a mature civilization seeks to understand and preserve its environment.”
Robert Frost’s idea—“something there is that does not love a wall”—is echoing throughout a universe that is, above all, about connection, and in which the very force of gravity may be seen as a metaphor for unconditional love.