Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more...
A brief biography of “the greatest mind of the modern age” and his revolutionary ideas.
The 2005 PBS Nova episode “Einstein’s Big Idea” was based on science writer and former Oxford professor Bodanis’ bestselling book. Here, the author takes a similar cinematic approach: the narrative is swift, focusing on personalities and simplifying complex ideas, which often works but occasionally converts science to the usual TV magic show. Bodanis passes quickly over his subject’s early years, including 1905, when Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. The author emphasizes that if Einstein had never been born, a contemporary would have made those discoveries, but it might have taken generations and several geniuses to duplicate his 1915 paper that converted the simple concepts of special relativity into the fiercely complex unification of mass, energy, space, and gravity that was general relativity. “What Einstein discovered,” writes Bodanis, “in the chill of wartime Berlin, was the greatest breakthrough in understanding the physical universe since Newton: an achievement for all time.” Einstein’s equations predicted an expanding universe. Since the 1915 universe was considered static, he added a “cosmological constant” to correct it, only to discard it when astronomers later discovered it was expanding. Although this was a mistake, Bodanis convincingly argues that it provoked a greater mistake. Einstein created general relativity from his own thoughts. On the single occasion he accepted scientific evidence, it was wrong. When quantum mechanics became accepted after 1920, he dissented. Certain that all matter obeyed precise laws, he rejected increasing evidence that subatomic particle behavior defied common sense. By the 1930s, this rejection placed him outside mainstream physics, where he remained, largely ignored, until his death.
Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more emphasis on the difficulties the scientist faced when physics moved away from the classical view he never abandoned.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-80856-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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