by Chet Raymo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003
A little masterpiece combining the individual and the cosmic with a fine but unflinching eye: informative, captivating,...
Raymo (Skeptics and True Believers, 1998, etc.) again proves himself a masterful scientist and affable guide as, simply by drawing on his daily walk to work, he shows how everything in the universe is connected to everything else.
For 37 years, he says, he has “walked the same path” back and forth from home to work—work being the teaching of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. Not only have those years made him familiar indeed with the flora and fauna of his route “along a street of century-old houses, through woods and fields, across a stream,” but familiar also with the history—civic, industrial, architectural—his path takes him through. Much of the landscape, he tells us, was designed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (of Central Park fame) for a member of the Ames family, the family that first (in 1803) harnessed the energy of the stream, Queset Brook, to begin the shovel-making factory that would grow eventually to provide most of the hand-digging tools for America’s westward expansion. “Scratch a name in a landscape,” says Raymo, “and history bubbles up like a spring.” Indeed it does, at least when Raymo does the scratching—and science bubbles up too, as, for example, he shows us how the Queset Brook (the Ames family “turned water and gravity into a family fortune”) is a small and interrelated part of all Earth’s water, and then how water in turn is an interrelated part of all life. In mid-century, the switch from water to coal power brought about “something profound,” a change that leads Raymo to guide us through still more history—all the way up to “greenhouse warming”—and still more science, botanical (“Coal is fossilized plants”), physical (“a lump of coal is a packet of stored sunlight”), even chemical, as we learn what we are made of.
A little masterpiece combining the individual and the cosmic with a fine but unflinching eye: informative, captivating, heartfelt.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8027-1402-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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by Richard Rhodes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1986
A magnificent account of a central reality of our times, incorporating deep scientific expertise, broad political and social knowledge, and ethical insight, and Idled with beautifully written biographical sketches of the men and women who created nuclear physics. Rhodes describes in detail the great scientific achievements that led up to the invention of the atomic bomb. Everything of importance is examined, from the discovery of the atomic nucleus and of nuclear fission to the emergence of quantum physics, the invention of the mass-spectroscope and of the cyclotron, the creation of such man-made elements as plutonium and tritium, and implementation of the nuclear chain reaction in uranium. Even more important, Rhodes shows how these achievements were thrust into the arms of the state, which culminated in the unfolding of the nuclear arms race. Often brilliantly, he records the rise of fascism and of anti-Semitism, and the intensification of nationalist ambitions. He traces the outbreak of WW II, which provoked a hysterical rivalry among nations to devise the bomb. This book contains a grim description of Japanese resistance, and of the horrible psychological numbing that caused an unparalleled tolerance for human suffering and destruction. Rhodes depicts the Faustian scale of the Manhattan Project. His account of the dropping of the bomb itself, and of the awful firebombing that prepared its way, is unforgettable. Although Rhodes' gallery of names and events is sometimes dizzying, his scientific discussions often daunting, he has written a book of great drama and sweep. A superb accomplishment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0684813785
Page Count: 932
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
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by Brian Fies illustrated by Brian Fies ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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