This lively account of Einstein's relationship with family and friends represents the opening salvo in what will likely be a barrage of ``tell-all'' books based on his papers. In the late 1980s scholars were given virtually unlimited access to Einstein's collected papers and personal correspondence. A series of revelations has ensued about the great physicist's turbulent personal life, such as his fathering of an illegitimate daughter. The authors of this volume, both British science journalists, put forth a compelling argument that, contrary to public perception, Einstein wasn't such a nice guy after all. His letters contain nasty comments about his parents, wives, scientific colleagues, and closest friends. (His favorite put-down was ``philistine.'') His unceasing flirtation with women, his disregard for other people's feelings, and his inability to achieve intimacy destroyed both marriages. For the last 22 years of his life he never visited his youngest son, Eduard, who spent most of his adulthood either in mental institutions or under the care of a guardian. Highfield and Carter go so far as to assert that Einstein's ``emotional myopia'' left behind a series of ``damaged lives.'' According to the authors, the executors of Einstein's estate suppressed the truth for decades to prevent these embarrassing disclosures. Highfield and Carter usually indict Einstein with his own words. They do offer enough damning direct source material to ensure that there's more than just a kernel of truth to this revisionist treatment. But too often they speculate on Einstein's emotional frame of mind or recreate conversations or events based upon second-hand accounts from dubious sources. And by virtually ignoring Einstein's considerable humanitarian and pacifist writings, the book hardly offers a balanced portrayal. His scientific contributions are given a superficial treatment, and the reader learns virtually nothing about his complex religious and philosophical outlook. In that sense, this portrait is tantamount to a Rembrandt biography that sporadically mentions that the Dutchman doodled on a canvas.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11047-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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