An exhilarating exploration of the cosmos that is both poetic and cutting-edge.
An award-winning particle physicist delivers an appealing explanation of the origins and evolution of the universe.
It’s a mystery that has plagued great thinkers for centuries: How did the universe come to be? Many theories, scientific and otherwise, have been put forth, but the true story of the universe’s first moments is still emerging. Tonelli, who played a role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, argues that new discoveries in physics are able to provide the clearest picture yet of how the universe emerged and where it’s going. From his descriptions of the Big Bang to human creativity and storytelling, the author’s writing is lush and inviting, offering countless points of entry even for those readers unfamiliar with fundamental concepts of physics. “Our lives,” writes Tonelli, “are conditioned by the story of the origins of the universe told by science: it profoundly shifts the foundations on which we will build new social arrangements, opening up vistas full of opportunities and risks, and shaping the future for coming generations.” In a concise yet action-packed narrative, the author organizes his survey of the cosmic beginnings into seven days, mimicking the biblical timeline of creation—from “Day One: An Irresistible Breath Produces the First Wonder” to “Day Seven: A Swarming of Complex Forms.” With clarity and just the right amount of technical language, Tonelli tackles complex subjects such as supersymmetry, dark matter, and the births of stars and planets. He also masterfully conveys the scientific and epistemic profundity of “how we look at the world, and therefore our place within it.” Entangled within his pursuit of scientific truth, the author’s overarching outlook is one of awe. The magnificent ideas he presents allow us “to understand our deepest roots, and to find ideas with which to face the future.” The book was a bestseller in Italy in 2019.
An exhilarating exploration of the cosmos that is both poetic and cutting-edge.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60048-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
A lucid and lively survey of Victorian explorers from Raby (English/Homerton College, Cambridge). ``For the English in the nineteenth century, abroad, and especially the Empire and the colonies, existed to bring things back from,'' notes Raby in a neat introductory capsulization. Bring things back they did, to a fare-thee-well, but they were also, the author makes clear, agents in the imperial juggernaut, ``part of a slow but inexorable process of domination and annexation.'' Opening the world to commerce may have been the end result, yet each of the venturers heard his or her own drummer and fashioned an inimitable style afield. Raby profiles Mungo Park, Richard Lander, and Heinrich Barth on their African sorties; Joseph Hooker's plant collecting in India and the mountain kingdoms to the north; Charles Darwin's monumental classification undertakings while being ferried about on the Beagle; the scientific entrepreneurs Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Wallace, and Richrad Spruce, who traded in beetles (a Victorian fancy), birds, and dried plants (though it is odd that Raby makes no mention here of the recent biopiracy controversies, particularly with Spruce, whose cinchona and rubber gatherings are a hot topic). And as women explorers have been given short shrift for their contibutions, Raby takes pains to chronicle the work of Mary Kingsley in West Africa and Marianne North's superb botanical artwork. Raby then turns his attentions to how the jottings of these explorers were appropriated and deployed by writers as diverse as Charles Kingsley, whose Water Babies Raby considers ``a coded tour round the scientific debates of the mid-century,'' and Samuel Burler in his utopian Erewhon, the romantic Rider Haggard, son-of-the-manse John Buchan, Dickens in Bleak House, and, of course, Conrad. Importantly, Raby shows how the works of the explorers shaped a new Darwinian and colonialist worldview, one that remains mighty influential in the modern imagination. (8 pages illustrations and maps)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-691-04843-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
A meticulously researched, frightening report on a deadly pathogen.
A gripping account of one of the most devastating infectious agents on the planet.
MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was once considered the exclusive bane of hospitalized patients, who were already weakened by disease or surgery, and hence prey to any infectious organism able to survive and adapt to the array of disease-fighting drugs used in health-care settings. Methicillin is an antibiotic that was first hailed as the successor to penicillin, designed to dispatch the bugs that had grown resistant to the first antibiotic. And so it did—until the bugs outwitted it. In time, strains of MRSA appeared not only in sick patients, but also in healthy people who had never been near a hospital. Science journalist McKenna (Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, 2004) writes that the first reports of community-based MRSA were scoffed at by the medical profession. The doctors assumed that the community patients had acquired infection from a bug that had escaped from the hospital. The strains were different, however, and so was their profile of drug resistance. McKenna traces a 50-year history of antibiotic-drug development and drug resistance, coming to the dismal conclusion that it’s a war we are losing. MRSA infections now kill nearly 20,000 Americans each year, and an estimated 4.4 million are colonized with the bug. Compounding the problem are the difficulties in hospital infection control—just getting staff to wash their hands between patients has proven a formidable hurdle. Testing all hospital admissions and isolating carriers has been effective, but the process is costly and comes with its own side effects—patients are left alone and have fewer check-ups by a staff that requires new gloves and gowns each time. Big Pharma has not helped, since companies see greater profit in drugs for chronic diseases. McKenna suggests that vaccines might be the answer, but it seems a distant hope—and too late for the patients whose heartbreaking stories she tells.
A meticulously researched, frightening report on a deadly pathogen.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5727-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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