Debut author Basti, a mathematician, explains the wide-ranging significance of Riccati differential equations frequently used in studies of motion in physics and engineering.
The focus of Basti’s research, and thus his professional life, are Riccati differential equations. Having studied this class of equations, among others, Basti is of the opinion that Riccati equations are fundamental to mathematics and many other disciplines, and that a more developed understanding and theoretical structure regarding these equations would be of immense practical and intellectual benefit. As he explains in the opening chapters, he also believes that current modes of mathematical thought are insufficient to this challenge, as they are often rooted in assumptions and patterns that aren’t necessarily rigorous enough by his standards; a new mode of analysis is needed to revitalize such thought, he says. However, in attempting to tie various examples from multiple disciplines together to bolster his thesis, Basti winds up following too many threads and creating a narrative that lurches from one topic to another. Entire chapters are devoted to films, historical trivia, music, the role of Jews in modern science and their historical mistreatment, without serious attempts to tie together these disparate elements or show how they relate to other chapters on economics or engineering, where there are at least superficial reasons why his work might apply. Even when Basti gets to discussing the fundamentals of his work, which takes up the bulk of the book’s second half, he digresses into ruminations on God, the idea of an expanding vs. a static universe, and relativity. Furthermore, frequent digressions betray both a lack of organization and a limited understanding of the theories on which he comments, which he admits to on occasion, as with his remarks concerning the uncertainty principle: “I do not have the laboratory experience in physics to be able to better understand the uncertainty principle.”
Despite occasional nuggets of intrigue, wildly uneven and simply too disorganized to hold much interest or credibility.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-3956-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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