A valuable account of an extraordinary man, although most readers will have to accept Hawking’s genius on faith.
Our era’s leading physicist receives an insightful send-off.
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) was the world’s most famous scientist. Sadly, it was his paralysis, rather than his discoveries, that made him almost universally recognizable. In 2003, Hawking contacted physicist and author Mlodinow to help with his popular science writing. Here, the author recounts their friendship as well as Hawking’s earlier life and makes an earnest attempt to explain his work. In 1963, beginning doctoral studies at Cambridge, Hawking developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive nerve degeneration that leads to paralysis and death. This devastating news, writes Mlodinow, left Hawking with “the choice of wasting away in spirit as well as body or finding a world of the mind in which he could still function. Where some in his situation found God, Stephen found physics.” Almost completely paralyzed by 1990, he continued work despite requiring 24-hour care. An American foundation helped at first, but it was popular writing, beginning with his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, that enabled him to bear the massive expenses associated with this care. Einstein’s iconic 1905 theory of special relativity, with its revelations on time, mass-energy, and light, have revolutionized our daily lives and technology. However, Hawking concentrated on Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity, which explains how gravity and space deviate from Newton’s simpler laws only at extremes—the massive gravity of stars and black holes or cosmic distances and times. As a result, scientists largely ignored it until Hawking took an interest in the 1960s. His controversial findings on the nature of black holes galvanized fellow physicists. The Big Bang idea originated in 1927, but Hawking’s calculations provided evidence that it happened. Mlodinow doesn’t delve deeply enough into Hawking’s unique brilliance, but he provides an illuminating portrait of perseverance and determination.
A valuable account of an extraordinary man, although most readers will have to accept Hawking’s genius on faith.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4868-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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