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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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