Hawking is both a scientific superstar and a man widely admired for overcoming—indeed, all but ignoring—the degenerative muscular disease ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), which has robbed him of almost all movement but left his mind intact. Hawking is hot on the trail of the ``Theory of Everything,'' the basic understanding of how the universe came into being and what makes it tick. His brilliant theories encompass the big bang (if there was one); black holes (which may not be black); and the astonishing question of why, among the infinite possibilities, the universe chooses to exist in the unlikely way that it does. God, time, and our place in the cosmos all seem as important to him as the complex equations governing the fundamental particles. This splendid, carefully researched study of the man and his ideas—based on interviews with Hawking, a good knowledge of his subject, and many secondary sources—balances the fascination of physics (extremely well described) with the fascination of the man. By his work, Hawking has earned a comfortable home to share with his wife of 26 years and his children. Still, he and Jane Hawking are separated; she says he wants to do "Areabsolutely everything that comes to his notice,'' leaving little time for the family. Ego? Overcompensation? Or the sense of being so close to understanding that there's room for little else? Does the personal drama have anything to do with the universe? With this man and this universe, probably. B&w photos; graphs and diagrams; full source notes; bibliography; glossary; index. (Nonfiction. 13+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-531-11067-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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