In a short account, Berlinski has wrought an astonishing synthesis—a sort of essential Newton for those not fearing to tread...
An exuberant, enlightening account of Newtonian mechanics by Princeton mathematician turned mystery novelist and essayist (The Body Shop, 1996, etc.).
Few, even among scholars, have actually read Newton’s Principia Mathematica, yet it is universally acclaimed as one of the pivotal works in modern science, reflecting the genius of its author, who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (the chair now held by Stephen Hawking). Enter Berlinski, who takes the reader by the hand and, through simple diagrams and patient prose, unveils some of the mysteries embodied in the concepts of force, mass, acceleration, and velocity symbolized in Newton’s laws. To begin with, he tells us, it was Newton’s gift to take the coordinate system developed by Descartes (which allowed the visualization of algebraic equations as curves) literally to the limit: that is, to see the velocity of a moving particle at a given point on its curve of motion as the measure of the change in distance over the change in time as time approaches zero (the limit). Thus was born the derivative, as defined in the calculus that Newton (and Leibniz) invented. Berlinski moves on from there to capture the mental workings of Newton as he wrestled with the motion of the moon as it circles the earth, neither escaping into space nor plummeting earthward. He also explores Newton’s later work on optics. He makes no excuses for the eccentricities of his subject (the vicious attacks on Hooke and Leibniz, the ruthless persecutions of counterfeiters when Newton was Master of the Mint), and he dutifully records Newton’s religious defection (his disbelief in the Trinity) and his excursions into alchemy and Biblical genealogies. He also reports on the few emotional episodes in Newton’s life, including a two-year mutual attachment between the already rich and famous mathematician and a young Swiss colleague, which may or may not have gone beyond words.
In a short account, Berlinski has wrought an astonishing synthesis—a sort of essential Newton for those not fearing to tread in mathematical waters.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84392-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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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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