``Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?'' Albert Einstein reportedly asked the New York Times in 1944. In this new collection of 11 essays on Einstein's life, physicist Pais responds, ``It is neither true that no one understands Einstein nor that everyone likes him.'' Pais speaks from a position of authority: He was a friend of Einstein's and wrote the highly acclaimed 1982 Einstein biography Subtle Is the Lord.... Whereas that volume focused on Einstein's scientific achievements and contained a plethora of equations incomprehensible to the layperson, this companion volume primarily illuminates Einstein's relationship with people both inside and outside the scientific community. For example, the reader catches several of Einstein's high-powered conversations with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr about the implications of quantum mechanics, and a fleeting yet fascinating debate concerning the nature of truth with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. In the concluding essays Pais generally allows Einstein to recount in his own words (through excerpts from his writings, speeches, and interviews) his views on religion, philosophy, and politics. We learn how Einstein used his worldwide fame to disseminate his views on pacifism and supranationalism through the media (views that provoked anti-Semitic reactions and charges of Communist leanings from right-wingers). Along the way, Pais sheds new light on some of the controversies surrounding this intellectual giant. For instance, Pais lays to rest the claim that Einstein's first wife, Mileva Mari, played a significant creative role in the development of special relativity. Pais also explains how Einstein's scientific mind-set prevented him from accepting the indeterminate nature of quantum mechanics—even though he called it ``the most successful physical theory of our period.'' There is considerable repetition from essay to essay and despite the author's best intentions, much of the scientific discussion will lie beyond the grasp of the lay reader. Those seeking a broad overview of Einstein's life will be better served elsewhere.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-853994-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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