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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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