Sympathetic study of a man whose achievements were overshadowed by his inability to understand how science was changing.
Noted science writer Lindley (Boltzman’s Atom, 2001, etc.) chronicles the life of an eminent Victorian scientist, in his time considered second only to Newton.
The author picks up the career of William Thomson (1824–1907) upon his arrival at Cambridge. The young man’s father gave him an exceptional head start, taking the family on tours of the continent and teaching them advanced science. At age 16, William published a significant paper on heat flow, a subject soon to blossom into thermodynamics and become one of the foundations of classical physics. Thomson contributed significantly to thermodynamics, even giving it its name, but never developed a full-blown theory of heat. Inability to see the larger implications of his ideas was a characteristic shortcoming, despite an impressive record of success. Accepting a professorship at Glasgow, Thomson supplemented his academic income with practical ventures. He advised the company that laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable, in the process inventing an improved receiver. He developed a compass that became the British naval standard for 40 years. Work like this, which bolstered England’s economic and technological supremacy, led to Thomson’s elevation to the peerage as Lord Kelvin in 1892, the first British scientist to be so honored. But in his practical side lay the seeds of his downfall. Thomson questioned geologists’ estimates of the age of the earth after calculating (correctly, given the energy sources known at the time) that the sun’s total lifetime could be only a few million years. When the discovery of radioactivity showed a way out of the impasse, he refused to amend his position. This failure of imagination made him a scientific fossil, the embodiment of classical physics just as its edifice began to crumble. Lindley deftly interweaves accounts of Thomson’s scientific career, his relations with his contemporaries, and his personal life, always cocking an eye to the larger historical picture.
Sympathetic study of a man whose achievements were overshadowed by his inability to understand how science was changing.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-309-09073-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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