``He is a second Dirac,'' Princeton's Eugene Wigner said, ``only this time human.'' That's only one of the many pithy descriptions that Gleick (Chaos, 1987) quotes in this fine, monumental biography of a monumental figure in 20th-century physics. Readers whose appetites were whetted by the as-told-to collections of anecdotes in the Ralph Leighton books (Tuva or Bust!, 1991, etc.) will find gratification of a different kind here. There are wit and playfulness, yes, but what shines through is Richard Feynman's commitment to probe nature, a restlessness to understand why things happen, and the joy and beauty he felt when science yielded an answer—and that is the key to understanding what drove Feynman throughout his life. That, and a no-nonsense attitude that despised pretension, lofty language, and rote learning. In the post-Sputnik days of educational reform, Feynman was out in front criticizing the new math as utterly useless formalism (unless you could use it to explain to kids different orders of infinity). While Feynman was best known for his Nobel- winning work in quantum electrodynamics and subsequent achievements in particle physics, Gleick traces the many byways in the physicist's career: his study of helium superfluidity; his brief flirtation with molecular biology; his interest in sleep and dreams. And then there were his involvement with the Manhattan Project; the loss to tuberculosis of his beloved Arline; his relentless womanizing; his eventual marriage to Gweneth—the English woman he met on a beach in Geneva and arranged to bring over as his domestic servant; his children; his lectures; his refusal to take graduate students; his skepticism about grand unified theories; the Challenger disaster. Gleick weaves all these threads into a rich portrait of an imperfect, complex, to-his-own-self-and-to-science-be-true figure, loved and admired, yet elusive. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40836-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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