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THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY

: A LIFE OF THE INDIAN GENIUS RAMANUJAN

Destructive forces of East and West combine to crush the flower of genius in this brilliantly realized biography of a self- taught, turn-of-the-century mathematician, by the author of Apprentice to Genius (1986). Born in 1887 to humble circumstances in a southern Indian backwater, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar received little encouragement in his growing obsession for mathematics—fueled particularly by his discovery of a forty-year-old math book written by an English tutor. Nevertheless, Ramanujan began compulsively filling his own notebooks with scribbled mathematical theorums, heedless of the fact that he was flunking out of one after another of the area's universities, all designed by the British to train native administrators rather than cultivate Indian genius. At age 26, unemployable, misunderstood and desperate for sponsorship, Ramanujan mailed a sample of his work to the eminent young British mathematician, G. H. Hardy, thus initiating what would become one of the surprising discoveries of twentieth-century mathematics—his own brilliant, still insufficiently-plumbed, understanding of the nature of numbers. Greatly impressed, Hardy arranged for Ramajuran to join him in Cambridge, where the Indian enjoyed the joys of subsidized intellectual labor and international appreciation at the price of giving up the daily spiritual sustenance provided by his own culture. The trade-off proved too much. Prevented from returning to India once World War I commenced, cut off from the spiritual element he'd always integrated into his mathematical theories, and with only the ascetic atheist, Hardy, for company, Ramanujan went into a steep physical decline. Seven years after his arrival in England, at age 33, he was dead. Kanigel's particular interest in how primitive superstition, India's bureaucratic mindset, English spiritual asceticism and a Western war combined to destroy the miracle of Ramanujan's genius adds deeper dimensions to the already fascinating story of a difficult but astoundingly fruitful cross-cultural co

Pub Date: May 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-684-19259-4

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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