Segrè effectively combines science history with the personal lives of the conference participants, offering an enlightening...
The story of a 1932 meeting at the Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Institute that brought together some 40 physicists, among them the founders of quantum mechanics.
The title comes from an impromptu spoof of Goethe’s Faust staged by the junior physicists at the meeting, lightheartedly lampooning their famous elders. Some of those “elders” were barely in their 30s, notably Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg, the brightest physics stars of their day. The one they all acknowledged as a father figure was Niels Bohr, host of the conference. Lise Meitner, the only woman present, was perhaps the finest experimental physicist there, or anywhere. Two giants were absent: Albert Einstein, who was leaving Europe in response to Germany’s turn toward Adolf Hitler, and Wolfgang Pauli, perhaps the age’s sharpest critical intellect. Segrè (Physics and Astronomy/Univ. of Pennsylvania; A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe, 2002) gives a clear, non-technical summary of the discoveries and advances that led up to the Copenhagen meeting, and he explores the personal relationships of the key figures. Bohr, whom the authors of the Faust skit put in the role of God, tended to find his ideas in dialogue with others, often pushing them to the edge of exhaustion with his questioning. Heisenberg, Bohr’s prize pupil, was the most daring innovator, best known for his “uncertainty principle” defining the limits of what can be measured in physics. Dirac, whose extreme literalness became legendary, laid down the mathematical underpinnings of the new science. And Meitner was shortly to hit upon the key to nuclear fission—the discovery that transformed physics into a genuine Faustian bargain with its application to warfare.
Segrè effectively combines science history with the personal lives of the conference participants, offering an enlightening look at a key event in modern science and those who took part in it.Pub Date: June 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-03858-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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