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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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