Curious about that froth on your cappuccino? Here’s the place to take its measure. But it is the reader who will have to...
An exploration of the science of foam that is also an engaging appreciation of its cultural uses—think of your beer’s head or cappuccino’s cap—from physicist Perkowitz (Empire of Light, 1996).
Foam is one of those peculiar and intriguing semi-states, not really liquid or gas or solid, but an arrangement of adjoining bubbles and cells of gas within a liquid or solid. Perkowitz takes readers on a Cook’s Tour through the substance’s extensive and quirky world, from ocean whitecaps to champagne, pumice, and bread—the foamy turmoil of quantum events. He works his thrall mostly in the cultural aspects of foam: how it effects the flavor of beer, the taste of bread; how it brought about an environmental crisis with its near indestructibility as exemplified by packing peanuts and Macdonald’s clamshell burger containers; the ethereal pleasures of meringues and soufflés and mousses; the aesthetic chords struck by paintings of churning waves from Hokusai to Homer. But when Perkowitz delves into the physics of foam, he gets bogged down. It may be that the mechanical and dynamic properties of foam are simply not compelling, but it does seem as though something as wondrous as sonoluminescence (the act by which bubbles change sound into light) ought to have readers gasping in awe. It doesn’t, here. More problematical is that Perkowitz at times comes perilously close to a tone of cooing condescension: “No doubt you’ll soon notice the remarkable diversity of matter that surrounds us.” At the end of the book, he does manage to make his science sing when he describes the cosmos as having the distinct qualities of foam as witnessed through the distribution of galaxies across space.
Curious about that froth on your cappuccino? Here’s the place to take its measure. But it is the reader who will have to provide the initial spark of interest, for though Perkowitz can be entertaining, he is not alluring.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8027-1357-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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