Provocative and hard to put down, but only for the science savvy.
A new theory of how energy sculpts order throughout the universe.
Science usually advances in tiny increments within cloistered disciplines through peer-reviewed publications. This debut, though, is audacious in scope and approach. Gunter, a trained ecologist but not an academic, introduces a simple yet profound and largely homespun system that, if proved, would require a paradigm shift across all disciplines. He proposes seven new thermodynamic laws to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the existing second law—entropy, or the dissipation of energy—and increasing order in the cosmos, which he attributes to the operation of natural selection upon all structures, not merely the biological. Levolution, Gunter says, is the energy-driven process of “changing a group or population of existing entities such that they organize into a single new whole, a new entity, a new monad, or new kind of unit”—i.e., particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, populations, solar systems, and galaxies—all in the service of maximizing and speeding the flow of energy to lower potentials: i.e., entropy. Gunter spent 30 years developing his theories and writing this book. He credits and builds upon the work of others, but his synthesis is new, and he has coined several terms as he organized these new laws. He challenges others to prove or disprove his ideas. The text, however, is devoid of mathematical support; the only formula in the book is Einstein’s familiar E=mc2. Gunter has an engaging style and often lightens his subject’s heft: “While the idea of energy’s descent to ‘entropic doom’ or the ‘heat death’ of the universe has been around to depress people for decades, few people really understand how deeply nature is involved in this Entropy project.” Of his proposal for 10 thermodynamic laws, he says, “[T]hey will now fit perfectly on two clay tablets.” Gunter writes clearly and intends the work as “popular science,” though he occasionally uses arcane allusions that will baffle many, such as “Jane’s radius” from gravitational physics and “slits and waves” experiments from particle physics. There is copious intentional repetition, as if drilling the reader in a new language, which in some ways it is. By the end, those who have stuck around will be able to complete many of his sentences.
Provocative and hard to put down, but only for the science savvy.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480810075
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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