An informative, if unexciting, account of a celebrated scientist’s training and career.
A debut work novelizes the life of physicist Enrico Fermi.
Growing up in Rome in the 1910s, Fermi is a precocious teenager, scouring the book carts in the Campo de’ Fiori for texts about quantum theory and letting the air out of soccer balls in order to increase their trajectory. After the unexpected death of his older brother, Enrico pours himself even more into his books to distract himself from his grief. He soon begins solving problems of projective geometry that have eluded older, better-educated minds. After studying physics at a university in Pisa, he returns to Rome to take up a professorship and meets Laura Capon, who becomes his wife. “You are the physics genius, or at least that is what I have heard,” Laura tells him during their first encounter. “But you certainly don’t act like one.” While in Rome, Fermi makes unprecedented advances in the field of physics, postulating the existence of the neutrino and adding essential discoveries to quantum theory. But the rise of the Fascists forces Fermi and his young family to flee the country (as Laura is a Jew). Arriving in America, he lends his ingenuity to the service of his adoptive country’s efforts to defeat the Axis powers, providing him with the greatest challenge of his professional life: the Manhattan Project. Fuglei writes in an amiable prose that animates key moments of her subject’s life: Fermi “handed Baudino the keys and stepped outside the jeep, but his foot gave way on something soft. It was the carcass of a jackrabbit that had been eviscerated by the blast.” Even so, the book reads less like a novel than a biography, with most of the information given as exposition. The dramatized scenes rarely contain true drama, and the characters are uniformly portrayed as well-meaning folks without serious flaws or depth. The work is part of the Mentoris Project series, the goal of which is to offer flattering accounts of notable Italians. Even so, great novels have been written about historical figures (even physicists), and readers will likely wish Fuglei had taken a few risks.
An informative, if unexciting, account of a celebrated scientist’s training and career.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947431-00-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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