A science geek’s delight, and useful reading for the inveterate gambler of the house.
Forget about planning for the future: Chaos is king, the random reigns and no system can beat the house odds.
So one might conclude from onetime Caltech physicist Mlodinow’s spry look at the rising field—and, it seems, publishing trend—of what might be called randomness studies. As he writes, affectingly, his mother, who survived the Holocaust, subscribed to the forget-planning school after her careful sister was consigned to death. Her experience, he writes, “has taught me to appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.” Small comforts, perhaps, but the case studies he assembles point strongly to the essential vanity of human wishes, whether they be efforts to beat the odds at Vegas or to predict the chartbusting potential of a screenplay. On the second note, Mlodinow (Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life, 2003, etc.), who knows his Hollywood, quotes a studio executive who once remarked, “If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the other ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.” Thus randomness, which plays havoc with probability and makes it devilishly hard for ordinary mortals to discern trends and, moreover, exceptions to trends. Mixing hard science with an easygoing approach that makes liberal but not annoying use of pop-culture references, Mlodinow ventures onto conceptually strange ground: the law of the sample space, for instance, which is supposed to apply “only to outcomes that are equally probable” but manages to find, yes, exceptions. He delights in finding the limits of probability, as with the elderly French woman who mortgaged her desirable apartment to a young lawyer who was to take it over after her death, then proceeded to outlive him—indeed, to attain the age of 122, skewing all the statistics.
A science geek’s delight, and useful reading for the inveterate gambler of the house.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42404-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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