Eternity is a daunting concept, but modern cosmologists are not afraid to face it. Cosmology usually concentrates on the beginnings of the universe, but what might happen at the other end of time is just as intriguing—and by far the greater portion of the story. Adams and Laughlin, two leading astrophysicists (at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively) divide the life span of the universe into five acts, beginning with the Primordial Era, the time of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath, when hydrogen and helium were first formed in an explosive birth. The Stelliferous Era is our present period, when stars fill the universe with visible light. The authors expect this to last another 100 trillion years. The universe doesn—t end with the fading of the visible stars, but enters a time dominated by lesser lights: brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and other stellar remnants. This is the Degenerate Era, when the primary source of cosmic energy is proton decay, slow and feeble: a typical degenerate star might achieve the brightness of half a dozen ordinary light bulbs. An occasional stellar collision may light up the sky with a supernova. After all protons decay, the universe will enter its fourth act: the Black Hole Era. Black holes’ enormous gravity protects them from losing mass and energy by ordinary processes, but they slowly dissipate through Hawking radiation and will become extinct after ten-to-the-hundredth-power years. This leaves only the most tenuous forms of matter and energy to fill out the Dark Era: electrons, neutrinos, and low-energy photons that interact only sporadically. The authors fill in this broad outline in fascinating detail, considering such questions as the long-term prospects for life and the possibility of recollapse to a singularity (a “Big Crunch”) rather than a slow dying out of the fire. A thought-provoking treatment of the grandest of subjects, highly recommended to anyone interested in the world beyond tomorrow.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85422-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
In three essays based on lectures, Lewis provides an engaging overview of the cultural and political clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic world from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries. Lewis (Near Eastern Studies/Princeton Univ.; Islam and the West, 1993, etc.) takes as his starting point 1492, the year not only of Columbus's discovery of the "New World" but also of Catholic Spain's victory over Islam, after four centuries of struggle, on the Iberian Peninsula. Six months later, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Spain's Jews, with profound repercussions for all three monotheistic civilizations. Though banished from Western Europe, it wasn't until 1683 that Muslim armies, under the flag of the Ottoman Empire, were repulsed from Vienna for the last time. In briefly tracing the millennium-long clash, Lewis demonstrates how the Christian and Islamic cultures sometimes mirrored each other, noting, for example, that the Crusade resembles a jihad and that the European Renaissance was preceded about 500 years earlier by a great Muslim cultural flowering. He writes far more briefly of Judaism, but here, too, he illuminates, as in his clear discussion of the economic and political forces that drove the Ottoman Empire to welcome the Jews expelled from Spain. Lewis's multilayered analysis of why the West ultimately gained the upper hand over the Islamic world ranges broadly from the technological (the West used gunpowder, which the Muslim world largely scorned) to the linguistic (Western Europe developed written vernaculars from Latin, which accelerated receptivity to cultural change, while the Islamic world retained the beautiful, but somewhat stilted, style of classical Arabic well into the modern era). The book is marred only by a closing, overstated paean to Western civilization, in which Lewis claims that Western thinkers alone in human history have manifested intense curiosity about cultures other than their own. Still, despite its tantalizing brevity, an elegant book.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0195102835
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reiger, conservation editor of Field & Stream (Wanderer on My Native Shore, 1983, etc.) offers a paean to life lived close to the land. In their early 30s, Reiger and his wife, Barbara, abandoned fast-track publishing careers in New York and Washington, D.C., to settle in a quiet backwater community of coastal Virginia. This graceful memoir is largely a response to his shocked urban colleagues who asked, ``How could you do it?'' As he and his wife restore their traditional Eastern Shore farmhouse and harvest, hunt, and fish on the 67 acres of their farm, Heron Hill (which they had purchased in 1970), he feels a growing sense of connection to the land and the people who live there. He relishes a full range of country life, from salvaging serendipitous roadkill to learning the lore of his ``born here'' neighbors. This account is dense with the detail of hedgerow planting, proper nesting-box placement, the merits of mummichogs (a kind of small fish) for bait and tree swallows for mosquito control. A close observer of nature, Reiger looks also at some of the larger lessons it has taught him: Living off the land instills self-reliance, which is the only access to wisdom; traditional gender roles are rooted in the natural world; pain is proportional to one's ability to survive. His theory of conservation is equally grounded in his farm experience. Save-the- whale rallies and rainforest fund-raisers are not for him. ``Real conservation is hands on, net gain, local habitat manipulation and species management. It's not about letting nature take its course.'' Reiger is the author of 15 books and hundreds of magazine articles, but this memoir suggests that his most satisfying creative act has been the stewardship of his own land. A deeply felt, immensely satisfying memoir.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-296-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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