Inspiring and very readable portrait of a free-spirited genius.
A former Caltech physicist pulls no punches as he recalls his encounters with Richard Feynman.
Like many scientists of his generation, Mlodinow (Euclid’s Window, 2001) was attracted to physics by Nobelist Feynman’s published lectures on quantum theory. In 1981, this newly minted Ph.D. found himself in an office just down the hall from his idol. Caltech was then, as now, one of the major centers of physics research: Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann was in the office next door, and another faculty member at the time was John Schwarz, the leading advocate of a then-disreputable notion that would eventually blossom into string theory. Uncertain what he was doing in such high-powered company, Mlodinow had long talks with Feynman about every aspect of science and life. The physicist permitted his young colleague to tape some of their conversations, and this account is based in part on transcripts of those tapes, interspersed with Mlodinow's reminiscences about life at Caltech. Neither the author nor his famous not-quite-mentor were comfortable in academic culture. Feynman was a notorious nonconformist, often working on physics in strip clubs, or eating lunch at the student union instead of at the elegant faculty club. Mlodinow spent much of his free time smoking dope and watching old gangster movies with working-class friends. He dabbled in fiction writing, a pastime most of his scientific colleagues regarded with suspicion if not outright scorn. Feynman did what he could to assuage Mlodinow's trepidations about a physics career, offering insights into scientific creativity and the nature of physics, as well as more general topics. Already diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Feynman had arrived at unconventional conclusions about the world at large.
Inspiring and very readable portrait of a free-spirited genius.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53045-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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