The author’s first introduction to the physicist who became a hero to him occurred in high school, when a science teacher...
“Richard Feynman was a legend for a whole generation of scientists, long before anyone in the public knew who he was,” writes Krauss (Physics/Arizona State Univ.; The Physics of Star Trek, 2007 etc.) in this engaging biography.
The author’s first introduction to the physicist who became a hero to him occurred in high school, when a science teacher gave him Feynman's (1918–1988) popular work The Character of Physical Law. In 1974, Krauss, then an undergraduate physics major, attended a keynote address by Feynman, and a photo of him talking to the physicist appeared in a national magazine. However, it was really only after the 1986 Challenger disaster that Feynman's name became widely known—as a member of the NASA investigatory panel, he placed an O-ring in a glass of ice water, demonstrating its vulnerability to cold. This incident encapsulates Feynman's creative genius and his ability to solve puzzles by unconventional means—whether about the foundations of quantum physics or simply a matter of poor engineering. Krauss traces how he refused to accept the conventional wisdom on any subject but would scrutinize it from different points of view before coming to his own conclusion. Feynman's work has had an impact on almost every aspect of modern science today, from nanotechnology to particle physics, semi-conductors and high-temperature superconductors. In the author's view, he was arguably the most important scientist in the latter half of the 20th century, comparable to Einstein in influence, although his genius was not to achieve fundamentally new results but to look at “old things from a new viewpoint.” Krauss explains the complicated scientific material in a clear, lively style that would have earned Feynman's approval.Pub Date: March 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06471-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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