Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved...
Hawking (co-author: The Grand Design, 2010 etc.) briefly examines his life and his well-earned celebrity status—“partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius.”
Although he is now almost completely immobilized by the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), the author looks back on his life with “quiet satisfaction,” with both his personal life and also due to his major contributions to understanding the relationship between the origins of our universe and the existence of black holes. He writes convincingly of the past 50 years: “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics.” He describes his early fascination with electric trains and the complex board games that he invented as early manifestations of his drive to understand how systems work and how to control them. Just as he was beginning his doctoral work at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with ALS and given only two years to live. Until that time, his academic career had been unremarkable, and he admits to affecting a typical student pose at the time: being bored with life. Eventually, though, his life took on a new zest, especially after he became engaged to his first wife. By 1979, when their third child was born, he had made his mark with a series of groundbreaking discoveries, and he occupied the prestigious position of Cambridge's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a chair originally held by Isaac Newton). His first popular work on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1988), became a widely translated, global best-seller.
Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved ends with intriguing hints on the current direction of his thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53528-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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