A good summary of an important era in science and one of its underrated stars.
Everyone knows about Foucault’s pendulum, but who knows anything about the man himself?
Mathematician Aczel (The Riddle of the Compass, 2001, etc.) offers a corrective with the story of Léon Foucault (1819–68), whose famous experiment gave the first proof of Earth’s rotation. Aczel begins in 1851, when Foucault set up a pendulum in the cellar of the house he shared with his mother, then jumps back to establish a historical framework. The medieval church adopted the Ptolemaic theory of the cosmos because it agreed with biblical texts implying that Earth is the unmoving center of the universe. When Copernicus and later scientists challenged Ptolemy’s theory, one rejoinder was that no one could detect the Earth’s rotation. Aczel summarizes the arguments up until the 19th century, then switches to Foucault’s early years. The son of a Parisian publisher, Léon suffered from poor health. He left medical school because the sight of blood sickened him, but his professors encouraged him to apply his talents to research, and he became a consummate scientific generalist. Foucault made the first photographs of microscopic objects and of the sun through a telescope. Later, he measured the speed of light with high accuracy. But his lack of formal scientific training held him back. For years he worked as science reporter for a prominent daily newspaper, and even after his 1851 pendulum experiment he fought for recognition. His prime ally was Napoleon III, science-loving Emperor of France, who secured for Foucault the honors the scientific establishment had refused him, including a Ph.D. and membership in the Academy of Science shortly before his premature death. Aczel effectively uses Foucault’s story to provide a vivid panorama of Second Empire Paris, although occasionally the transitions are a bit rough.
A good summary of an important era in science and one of its underrated stars.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6478-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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