Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved...
Hawking (co-author: The Grand Design, 2010 etc.) briefly examines his life and his well-earned celebrity status—“partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius.”
Although he is now almost completely immobilized by the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), the author looks back on his life with “quiet satisfaction,” with both his personal life and also due to his major contributions to understanding the relationship between the origins of our universe and the existence of black holes. He writes convincingly of the past 50 years: “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics.” He describes his early fascination with electric trains and the complex board games that he invented as early manifestations of his drive to understand how systems work and how to control them. Just as he was beginning his doctoral work at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with ALS and given only two years to live. Until that time, his academic career had been unremarkable, and he admits to affecting a typical student pose at the time: being bored with life. Eventually, though, his life took on a new zest, especially after he became engaged to his first wife. By 1979, when their third child was born, he had made his mark with a series of groundbreaking discoveries, and he occupied the prestigious position of Cambridge's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a chair originally held by Isaac Newton). His first popular work on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1988), became a widely translated, global best-seller.
Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved ends with intriguing hints on the current direction of his thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53528-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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