Bittersweet but celebratory.
An account of the tragically brief life of mathematician Danny Lewin (1970–2001), whose innovative algorithms “[changed] the Internet forever.”
When the Denver-born former Israeli Defense Forces soldier entered MIT in 1996 to begin work on a doctorate in mathematics, the Internet was still very much a work in progress. It offered limitless possibilities as the information superhighway, but its “complex architecture” was plagued by an ever-present congestion that no one seemed to know how to alleviate. While working with Tom Leighton, the graduate adviser who would become his business partner and close friend, Lewin wrote a set of algorithms that would transform the Internet from the “World Wide Wait” into a faster, more efficient communication tool. His aim was to become an academic like his mentor, but the desire to provide a better life for his family motivated him to turn his ideas into a business. In 1997, he and Leighton entered the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in hopes of attracting the money they needed to fund a content-delivery company they christened Akamai Technologies. Although they lost, Lewin continued to pursue their dream with a passion that caught the attention of both high-level venture capitalists and brilliant young computer scientists. By late 1999, Akamai boasted clients like Disney, Apple and Yahoo and had made Lewin and Leighton into billionaires. Lewin died—though with his military training, “not without a fight”—when his plane crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Ironically, it was his trailblazing technology that helped online news sources like CNN and MSNBC withstand the colossal worldwide demand for information about the attacks that killed him along with thousands of innocent bystanders.
Bittersweet but celebratory.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82166-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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