A chorus of adulatory voices sings the praises of the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but fortunately the voice that rings loudest and clearest is Feynman's. Popularizers of the scientist's life are quick to mention the pleasure he derived from and the competence he displayed on the bongos, but he never beat the drum for his genius the way the myth- makers here do. Hardly a discouraging word is heard from the colleagues (Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann), the family (sister Joan, grateful for his encouragement of her own Ph.D. pursuits, wife Gweneth, and their children), the artists and sidekicks, the friends and barkeepers. None of them are nearly as interesting as Feynman's own descriptions of his life and work. Particularly noteworthy is his account of how he mastered hard subjects as a boy by reading into the text as far as he could go, then rereading and rereading so he could go farther each time. In another striking passage he describes how he visualizes the world of jiggling atoms and how the jiggles explain phenomena as varied as heat and magnetism. These moments illuminate Feynman's remarkable intuition about how the world works. Math in the abstract did not appeal; what he did was invent the math needed to get the physics right. All of this should be extraordinarily interesting to educators, psychologists, and historians of science, since it provides key insights into the mind of the man who invented the famous F. diagrams but whose curiosity also turned to computers, the invention of the world's smallest motors, and the study of art. Colleagues provide additional reflections, and the recreational and travel tales are the stuff of myth. (Filmmaker Sykes has made two documentaries about Feynman.) But the real meat—and the book's worth—resides in the master's words.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03621-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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