A fascinating account of an iconoclastic scientific polymath and the lively collection of scientists who were his friends.
The remarkable life and times of Freeman Dyson, whose broad-ranging contributions to modern science included quantum physics, the exploration of space, genetic engineering and more.
Born in Britain in 1923, Dyson's career began in World War II. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in mathematics, he was assigned to Bomber Command Headquarters and tasked with analyzing the effectiveness of British raids on Germany. Schewe (Joint Quantum Institute/Univ. of Maryland; The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World, 2006) chronicles the evolution of Dyson's career, illuminating the scientific issues as they unfolded in terms comprehensible to lay readers. After the war, Dyson emigrated to the U.S. and connected with scientists who had been involved with the Manhattan Project and were now turning their attention back to fundamental questions in particle physics and quantum field theory. The hot topic of the day was quantum electrodynamics, and the two major contenders, Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman, appeared to be at odds. It was Dyson's brilliant contribution that unified their theories. While this was the high point of Dyson's career, his major contributions continued. After several years at Cornell University, he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to join Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he still works today. Although he joined the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament in 1980, Dyson also worked for the Pentagon as a technical consultant. While he was unwilling to collaborate actively with the author, Schewe nonetheless benefited from interviews with Dyson's friends and family.
A fascinating account of an iconoclastic scientific polymath and the lively collection of scientists who were his friends.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64235-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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