Rosenkranz argues that in 1922, Einstein was a man of his times when it came to the West’s images of the Orient, and “we...
An eye-opening collection of travel diaries from the legendary scientist and thinker.
In October 1922, Einstein (1879-1955) and his wife set out on a nearly five-month voyage to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain, financed by the lectures he would give. He kept a 182-page detailed diary with drawings, which is now being published for the first time. Rosenkranz (Einstein Before Israel: Zionist Icon or Iconoclast?, 2011, etc.), senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project, has provided a translation with facing facsimile pages, additional texts, photographs, and a lengthy historical introduction. In what the editor describes as a “quirky” and “telegraphic manner,” Einstein recorded his impressions of things he had seen, people he met, and some musings on science, philosophy, art, and world events. Rosenkranz is convinced that Einstein had no intention of publishing it, and he writes that in “spite of his public advocacy of human rights, it was science, not humanity, that lay at the center of Einstein’s universe.” As he worked on the diary, Rosenkranz became troubled by entries that “amounted to xenophobic comments about some of the peoples he encountered.” Many will find Einstein’s comments quite shocking. On the Chinese mainland, he describes an “industrious, filthy, lethargic people.” They squat at eateries “like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods.” The “children are spiritless,” and it “would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races.” He had a more favorable opinion of the Japanese—“unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing”—and yet, Rosenkranz notes, he was “mystified by their alleged lack of scientific curiosity.” At Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, “obtuse ethnic brethren pray loudly….Pitiful sight of people with a past but without a present.”
Rosenkranz argues that in 1922, Einstein was a man of his times when it came to the West’s images of the Orient, and “we should not be too judgmental in our assessment.” That may be difficult for some readers, but the editor offers an accurate portrait of the Einstein of that era.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17441-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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