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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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