For readers put off by the overwhelmingly male, white, heteronormative world of physics, here is a warm, impassioned welcome.
Prying the universe open to make sure there’s room for everyone.
“Physicists are professional boundary-pushers,” writes Prescod-Weinstein (The Disordered Cosmos, 2021) in this wide-ranging survey of modern physics and cosmology. And she’s certainly pushing some boundaries, stylistically and politically. “The universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism, y’all,” she writes in a preface that opens with an Akan proverb and ends with a Hebrew prayer. Drawing from her African roots and Jewish heritage, her work in theoretical physics, her queerness, and references ranging from Langston Hughes to Big K.R.I.T., Prescod-Weinstein explores the edges of our knowledge, our cosmos, our metaphors, and our sociocultural norms. In scholarly but lively prose, she explains the Big Bang, relativity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics, calling attention to their cultural contexts. Relativity’s intermixing of space and time may have seemed strange to European Newtonians, but was common, for instance, in Hebrew prayers and in the Bantu language. And while curved space-time may have been foreign to Western scientists with their linear, Cartesian coordinates, the Palikur people of the Amazon “use a curvilinear coordinate system that they developed to mirror the shape of [a] giant anaconda snake.” One would hope that a physicist advocating a queer perspective would give us the science but tell it slant, but the explanations of the physics itself are for the most part old hat. Prescod-Weinstein is at her best when she lets the personal slip in: the ideas she’s changed her mind about, the experiments that keep her up at night, the questions she can’t let go. “There is a bizarre cultural tendency to treat physicists in particular as fascinating enigmas whose brains exist beyond the realm of everyday human politics,” she writes. “This isn’t true. The universe…is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more and no less.” That humanity shines through her writing. One feels a mind present on the page, actively working through ideas, producing a text that’s engaging and alive.
For readers put off by the overwhelmingly male, white, heteronormative world of physics, here is a warm, impassioned welcome.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780593701683
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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