Of some interest to historians of science and to students of the creative process, of which scientific thought is surely a...
Serviceable biography of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who invented the transistor.
Part of a Bell Laboratories team that included the later-to-be-controversial William Shockley and Walter Brattain, Bardeen (1908–91) had a gift for decomposing large problems into smaller, more easily soluble ones; faced with the challenge of developing a superconductor amplifier more reliable than the then-standard vacuum tube, he drew on his knowledge of quantum mechanics, chemistry, and mathematics to formulate an elegant theory of surface states that made the development of the transistor practicable. His subsequent work in problems of superconductivity was of material importance in the development of information technologies that are commonplace today. Bardeen’s role in the invention of the transistor, which occupies much of this narrative, is the subject of Hoddeson’s Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (with Michael Riordan, 1997), and readers of that study will find little new here. With co-author Daitch (a former student of Hoddeson’s at the University of Illinois, where Bardeen also taught), she adds a more fully rounded biography of Bardeen that emphasizes his family background and, well, ordinariness, often by providing exquisitely mundane details (“The Bardeens’ house in Summit was their first major financial investment. A comfortable Dutch colonial at 5 Primrose Place, it featured a sun porch, cellar, and detached garage”). This emphasis on Bardeen’s ordinary-Joe qualities—he loved to play golf and spend quiet time at home—the authors put to use in a curious disquisition on the nature of creativity and genius. Must one have funny hair like Einstein’s or play bongos like Feynman to be considered brilliant? Evidently so, they suggest, even while making a straw-man case for Bardeen as a bona fide brainiac who deserves to be better known—an assessment readers of this slow biography will not likely dispute in any event.
Of some interest to historians of science and to students of the creative process, of which scientific thought is surely a part.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-309-08408-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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