by Bruce J. Hillman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2015
A footnote to modern theoretical physics and the history of science. Readers may prefer the bigger picture provided by John...
History of the clash between “German” and “Jewish” physics in the early decades of the last century.
That clash explains why Albert Einstein ended up at Princeton and why his self-appointed nemesis, Philipp Lenard, ended his years stripped of academic rank but worshipping Adolf Hitler to the end. In what former University of Virginia School of Medicine chief of radiology Hillman (co-author: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—How Medical Imaging is Changing Health Care, 2010) calls “a memorable, character-driven story,” Lenard emerges as a kind of furious, single-minded Javert whose particular branch of experimental physics relied on studies of more or less observable phenomena, much removed from the theoretical physics in which Einstein traded. That divide, Hillman writes, had its origin in World War I and the virtual blockade of German scientists, cut off from the international community and defiantly nationalistic as a result. Einstein’s refusal to play along and his more independent path of inquiry earned him widespread antipathy. That, coupled with Lenard’s growing anti-Semitism and general ire over Einstein’s popularity, set a pattern of persecution that would last for as long as Einstein worked within the sphere of German influence—and Lenard bore more than his share of the burden of making Einstein’s life miserable. The writing is mostly serviceable, if sometimes infelicitous, but the storytelling is too often clunky and digressive. Einstein is given the sobriquet “the relativity Jew,” and Max Planck spends "an uncomfortable minute" with Hitler, while Lenard imagines him wondering, “how had he become so old?” and straining “against the constricting dark tie and starch-stiff collar that bit into his thin, old man’s skin.” Well, that’s what he gets for tangling with the quantum, one might think, but his larger punishment lies in being mostly forgotten today.
A footnote to modern theoretical physics and the history of science. Readers may prefer the bigger picture provided by John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Scientists (2003) and the better-written works on Einstein by Walter Isaacson and Alan Lightman, among others.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4930-1001-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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