A pleasing biography of the mathematician (the second this season after Paul Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, p. 795) by physicist, editor, and journalist Schechter. Erdos took part in the flowering of Hungarian creative and intellectual talent that developed in the first decades of this century with von Neumann, Teller, Szilard, von Karman, and Wigner in science, and Solti, Szell, Reiner, Dorati, Bartok, and Kodaly in music. His parents, nonpracticing Jews, were both high school teachers. At four, Erdos was already in love with numbers and at home with performing rapid calculations. When asked, “What is 100 minus 250?” he thought for a moment, and then shouted “150 below zero!,” thereby inventing negative numbers for himself. And it was the theory of numbers that remained the first love of his mathematical life. What makes this biography so amenable to the general reader is that many conjectures raised by number theorists are also grasped easily by nonspecialists. Schechter reconstructs Erdos’s life through interviews and memoirs of his friends, most importantly, Ronald Graham, the AT&T mathematician who became Erdos’s “handler” after his adored and adoring mother’s death. Indeed, therein lies a tale to titillate Freudians. It is said that Erdos had never buttered his own bread before leaving home for Cambridge. He chose not to marry and professed to be appalled by sex. Yet he loved children, whom he called “epsilons” (a math insider’s joke) and was rich in friendships. Erdos left Hungary before WWII, never won a permanent teaching post, was usually short of money, and got into trouble during the McCarthy era, but was undaunted and eventually cleared. Not only did he advance number theory and create new specialties in mathematics, but he also shifted math’s working style from that of a solo enterprise to joint and multiple collaborations. Schechter has mined his sources well to create a captivating portrait.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84635-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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