by Leonard Mlodinow ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2003
Inspiring and very readable portrait of a free-spirited genius.
A former Caltech physicist pulls no punches as he recalls his encounters with Richard Feynman.
Like many scientists of his generation, Mlodinow (Euclid’s Window, 2001) was attracted to physics by Nobelist Feynman’s published lectures on quantum theory. In 1981, this newly minted Ph.D. found himself in an office just down the hall from his idol. Caltech was then, as now, one of the major centers of physics research: Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann was in the office next door, and another faculty member at the time was John Schwarz, the leading advocate of a then-disreputable notion that would eventually blossom into string theory. Uncertain what he was doing in such high-powered company, Mlodinow had long talks with Feynman about every aspect of science and life. The physicist permitted his young colleague to tape some of their conversations, and this account is based in part on transcripts of those tapes, interspersed with Mlodinow's reminiscences about life at Caltech. Neither the author nor his famous not-quite-mentor were comfortable in academic culture. Feynman was a notorious nonconformist, often working on physics in strip clubs, or eating lunch at the student union instead of at the elegant faculty club. Mlodinow spent much of his free time smoking dope and watching old gangster movies with working-class friends. He dabbled in fiction writing, a pastime most of his scientific colleagues regarded with suspicion if not outright scorn. Feynman did what he could to assuage Mlodinow's trepidations about a physics career, offering insights into scientific creativity and the nature of physics, as well as more general topics. Already diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Feynman had arrived at unconventional conclusions about the world at large.
Inspiring and very readable portrait of a free-spirited genius.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53045-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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