by Lillian Hoddeson & Vicki Daitch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002
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
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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