Stellar research and prose combine in a splendid biography of physics’ most luminous supernova.
A comprehensive, sympathetic and very readable portrait of the man, the celebrity, the scientist and the theories that transformed physics and the modern world.
Neffe, a German journalist specializing in scientific topics, is supremely qualified for his complex task. Although Albert Einstein (1879–1955) lived his final decades in Princeton after fleeing Nazi Germany, he never learned much English and suffered numerous indignities in his adopted country. Marginalized by the new generation of physicists, surveilled by the ever-suspicious J. Edgar Hoover, he never managed to complete his work on unified theory. Neffe begins with the greatest indignity of all: the autopsy at which a pathologist removed and absconded with Einstein’s brain and an ophthalmologist his eyes. The narrative then backtracks to “His Second Birth” as a scientific star in 1919, then provides a steady chronological account moving from ancestry to birth to death. Neffe pauses occasionally to clarify such intellectual matters as Einstein’s celebrated “thought experiments,” his theories of special and general relativity, his distaste for the uncertainties of quantum mechanics; some of these sections are dense and difficult. The biographer carefully and compassionately explores Einstein’s personality, which remained childlike throughout his life. Twice married, he was unable to be much of a husband or father; he repeatedly failed to credit colleagues; he sometimes leaped without looking into turbulent waters of public debate. Though he saw the need for force against Hitler, he was a lifelong pacifist and predicted the horrors of nuclear confrontation. In later chapters, Neffe explores Einstein’s astonishing, enduring celebrity and finds opportunities to both credit and damn the United States. Americans helped popularize the physicist and his theories; they admired him for his belief in God; and they also called him a “commie” and treated him like Cassandra.
Stellar research and prose combine in a splendid biography of physics’ most luminous supernova.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-14664-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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