Astrophysicists are people, too. And that’s not always a good thing.
Such was the harsh lesson learned by 20-year-old prodigy Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—known as Chandra—when on Jan. 11, 1935, he rose before the august Royal Astronomical Society in London to announce his discovery that certain oversized stars would inexorably collapse into themselves to the point of nothingness. The young Indian graduate student expected to be lauded for his achievement. Instead, the most renowned British astrophysicist of the day, Sir Arthur Eddington, who had been Chandra’s inspiration and mentor, promptly ridiculed the finding, setting off a feud with the stunned Chandra that effectively halted his work on the subject for 40 years. In this scholarly, richly footnoted story, Miller (History and Philosophy of Science/University College, London; Einstein, Picasso, 2002) focuses on Chandra’s long struggle to overcome the setback of Eddington’s attack. (Chandra was later recruited by Enrico Fermi to the faculty at the University of Chicago, and in 1983 he received the Nobel Prize.) But in the process, he also introduces us to astrophysics research from the 1930s to the present, and to the often prickly, turf-guarding scientists behind them. The portraits of Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, along with many others, are fascinating as we follow their gaze from the stars deep in space to the microcosmos of atomic particles. Their realization that the answers to the life and death of stars could be found in the protons and electrons of the atom led to breathtaking discoveries—finally affirming Chandra’s theory on “black holes” as well as on the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Chandra himself chafed throughout his life under the prejudice he suffered as a nonwhite scientist.
Despite a generous index of biographical sketches, a glossary of scientific terms, and copious footnotes, this is still dense reading, aimed more at the scientifically inclined than the general reader. The rewards for the diligent, however, are many and profound.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-34151-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | MODERN | EXPEDITIONS | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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