A vivid retelling of events that still shape our lives today.
The first English-language biography of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), a highly respected figure in both of the author's families.
As Segrè (Physics and Astronomy/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology, 2011, etc.) and Hoerlin (Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America, 2011) note, the title “Pope of Physics” was jokingly bestowed on Fermi at the start of his career by his colleagues because he was able to use “the simplest of means [to] estimate the magnitude of any physical phenomena.” Segrè’s uncle, Emilio, was Fermi's first physics student in Rome, and the families maintained their friendship in the United States after they were forced to flee Mussolini’s increasingly anti-Semitic regime (the Segrè family and Fermi’s wife, Laura, were Jewish). The authors use this biography of Fermi's life—beginning with his university days, when he immersed himself in the new field of quantum physics, and culminating in his own groundbreaking accomplishments—to engagingly chronicle the major developments in nuclear physics that were the focus of his life's work. Fermi played a key role in a revolution in physics that set the stage for the development of semiconductors, transistors, computers, MRIs, and more. In 1925, he extended the exclusion principle formulated by Wolfgang Pauli—that no two electrons in an atom could have identical quantum numbers—to the broader field of statistical mechanics. His most significant discoveries, made in the 1940s after his move to America, involved the possibility of using slow neutrons to induce fission reactions and create a chain reaction. Fermi's scientific work arguably played a key role in the rapid conclusion of World War II and the shaping of the subsequent Cold War. While he advocated for further efforts at international control of nuclear weapons, he did not join the anti-nuclear movement.
A vivid retelling of events that still shape our lives today.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-005-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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