A fine, informative life of the renowned scientist.
How science, religion and politics shaped Einstein’s life and work.
As part of the Jewish Lives Series, Gimbel (Philosophy/Gettysburg Coll.; Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion, 2012, etc.) gives special emphasis to Einstein’s connections to Judaism. Born to secular Jews in Germany in 1879, Einstein attended a Catholic school, where he was bullied for being “the Jewish kid.” His response was rebellion: At the age of 8, he became “a deeply committed practicing Jew,” observing dietary and religious laws. That early conversion, however, was short-lived. By high school, he became skeptical of mysticism, preferring to believe in “a wholly material universe guided by rational principles discoverable through scientific investigation.” Continuing his education in Switzerland, his defiance against authorities of all kinds led to his renouncing his German nationality and eventually—in order to find a permanent job—taking on Swiss citizenship. Einstein’s work in a patent office is well-known; Gimbel thinks the work was “enjoyable and challenging,” since it involved investigating the technical originality of patent applications. Being a civil servant gave Einstein time to work on his own ideas, which culminated in publications that revolutionized thinking about matter, light, and Newtonian concepts of space, time, motion and mass. After being rejected for a Nobel Prize in physics for several years, Einstein finally earned one in 1921. Gimbel examines the role of anti-Semitism in Einstein’s difficulty in securing teaching appointments, as well as the scientist’s support of Zionism, which he hoped would help to create “a proud, self-possessed Jewish population who contributed to the betterment of all….Jews would be seen and, more important, see themselves, as valuable.” The FBI considered his pacifism a sign of subversion and created a file on him. During the war, he was horrified by the potential of an atomic bomb, declaring after Hiroshima, “the war is won, but the peace is not.”
A fine, informative life of the renowned scientist.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-19671-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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