That gleam shines throughout here.
Just when you thought the fount of Feymaniana had run dry comes this splendid collection of letters assembled and introduced by adopted daughter Michelle.
It starts with achingly heartbreaking letters to his first wife, Arline, who would die of tuberculosis in a sanitarium in Albuquerque while Richard worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Included is a letter he addressed to her after her death, which Michelle notes “is well worn—much more than others . . . as though he reread it often.” The letters are emblematic of the passion Feynman brought to his life and work and expressed in crystal-clear prose—in his lectures, his texts, his popular writing and in these letters to the world: colleagues, family, institutions, fans, worried parents, eager high-schoolers and the occasional crank. Over and over again, he tells kids to study what they love, tells their parents not to worry, patiently explains errors to would-be solvers of physics problems or coiners of new theories. Over and over again, Feynman reveals an integrity that led him to refuse any honorary degree, decline invitations to Russia as long as restrictions were imposed, decline signing petitions in the absence of what he saw was necessary evidence. Similarly, he often confessed his ignorance of the arts and refused to be drawn into discussions of art and science (but did comment on religion). The letters move chronologically through his settling down at Caltech, marriage to Gweneth, the Englishwoman he hired as a housekeeper, the Nobel in 1965, and the decades following, including, two years before his death from cancer, his pivotal role in demonstrating that faulty O-rings caused the Challenger disaster. Feynman’s article on what was wrong with the “New Math” and some neat popular articles are in the appendices, along with a quote in which Feynman describes his elation at discovering a new law of physics: “There was a moment when I knew how nature worked. It had elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming.”
That gleam shines throughout here.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7382-0636-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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