Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

In Herb Guggenheim’s The Goldbach Conjecture, Soleri College enters 2023 as an experimental public liberal arts school where students shape much of their education through pass/fail academic contracts. Its progressive culture has long welcomed students who see themselves as different, but Governor Randall Delago wants the college remade in his conservative Christian image. After filling six vacant trustee seats with political allies, Delago helps place Harold Cameron at the head of Soleri. Cameron begins replacing the school’s old academic identity with a faith-based direction, as gender studies faces elimination and professors are expected to fit the new “mission aligned” model. Religious academies soon become a source for incoming students. Visiting writing professor Skip Gershwin, who attended Soleri decades earlier, returns with his wife Gudrun Frege just as the institution he remembers is being transformed around them.

Herb Guggenheim’s The Goldbach Conjecture is fantastic political fiction, and Skip is someone who we genuinely want to follow. Guggenheim fleshes him out as a wonderfully eccentric professor, such as when his poetry class moves from sonnets into an argument over fascism. Cameron is a brilliantly diabolical antagonist, and Guggenheim shows us how firmly he believes Soleri should answer to his worldview. This is someone who can turn disagreement into policy with complete conviction, and it makes him infuriatingly effective on the book’s political stage. Guggenheim has a wonderful ear for dialogue, giving even academic conversations an offbeat rhythm. The author truly shines in bringing locations to life, from the Fuller Dome, where muted sunlight filters through multicolored panels above a three-tiered waterfall, to Venice, where footbridges cross narrow canals beneath old stone buildings. Well written and absorbing, this book will appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven political fiction.