Satisfying for those who get a special charge out of stories from the annals of science.
The consummate research scientist was a nice man, too, according to this respectful biography by Hirshfeld (Physics/Univ. of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Parallax, 2001).
An eager autodidact while still an apprenticed bookbinder, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) earnestly attended lectures at London’s Royal Institution, where he brought himself to the attention of aristocratic chemist Sir Humphrey Davy. He became Davy’s acolyte and Man Friday, traveling to the Continent with the great man and the great man’s scornful wife. Soon Faraday himself was lecturing at the Royal Institution. He eventually became a member, over the initial objection of Sir Humphrey, and remained at the Institution for the rest of his scientific career. The former craftsman entertained children with demonstrations of static electrical phenomena. He countered the craze for spiritualism with experiments that discredited the alleged art of non-corporeal furniture-moving. He devised and demonstrated prototypes of an electromagnetic motor, a transformer, a capacitor, a dynamo. He hypothesized about light waves, magnetic polarity and field theory. Among his magnets, galvanometers, coils and sparks, he conducted dazzling experiments that illuminated hitherto hidden forces of nature. While his electrical discoveries became landmarks in the history of science, there was little to shock anyone in Faraday’s personal history. He married, gained fame, became old and forgetful, then died peacefully, having given little offense during his long life. His correspondence reveals an elegant writer and a generous mentor to James Clerk Maxwell, among others. As a formulator of the modern scientific method and an exemplary investigator, he stood in the forefront of a distinguished line that led from benighted alchemy to technological innovations like BlackBerries and iPods. The author takes evident pleasure in recounting his subject’s scientific contributions.
Satisfying for those who get a special charge out of stories from the annals of science.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1470-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
