Alas, Feynman never got to make the journey. His stomach cancer caught up with him and he died in 1988. Leighton, the high-school math teacher who was Feynman's close friend, fellow drummer, and chief amanuensis (with two wonderful Feynman-told- to-Leighton biographies to his credit) narrates the saga of what began as a typical Feynman tease: Leighton, complaining that math was okay, said what he really wanted to teach was geography. Feynman, testing his knowledge, asked ``Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?'' Therein lies the tale. Tuva, to young stamp-collector Feynman, had been a set of handsome triangular and diamond-shaped stamps. Once an independent country northwest of Mongolia, it was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1944. What's more, its capital was spelled Kyzyl- -enough of an absurdity to make getting there the cause cÇläbre that would occupy Feynman and Leighton for the next ten years. It was the Soviet bureaucracy that did them in. First, they were told that since there was no Intourist agency there, it was no- go. Undaunted, they proceeded to track down every Tuvan authority in the world, and found grammars, phrase, and travel books that only whet their appetites more to see the yurts, yaks, and nomads, explore the art and ruins, and hear the native ``throat'' singers—able to sound two vocal lines simultaneously. They learned to write fractured Tuvan and ultimately arranged to have a major show of nomadic art tour the US. But the bureaucratic confusions and conflicts between Moscow and Tuva and Los Angeles, not to mention demands for rubles, always snatched the prize just when it was in sight. Since the book focuses more on the frustrations of making the trip and less on Feynman, it is not as satisfactory as the earlier books. On the other hand, it says a lot about coping with the bureaucracy and, yes, Leighton did eventually make it to Tuva.
Pub Date: April 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02953-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
