A roaming, eye-opening, insightful, and literate collection of science writing.
Complex science made accessible.
Novelist, physicist, and popular science writer Lightman gathers together essays—some previously published in the New Yorker, Guernica, the New York Times, and other publications—that discuss scientists, their imaginations, and their discoveries. “Spectacular things are going on out there,” he writes, “whether we notice or not.” As in his previous books of both nonfiction and fiction, Lightman is once again our helpful, genial guide to the mysteries of the universe. He begins with Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who was “practically unique in being a humanist and a scientist at once.” What the author finds most interesting about Pascal is his “imagination of the…infinitely small and the infinitely large.” In “What Came Before the Big Bang?” Lightman notes that physicists believe the “entire universe we see today was far smaller than a single atom,” and somehow time emerged—or did time already exist? He talks with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll about the future, with its “condition of increasing mess,” and the past, with its “increasing tidiness,” in terms of the “improbable smoothness of the observable universe.” Lightman wonders if space goes on “forever, to infinity?” Or is it “finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere”? In the essay “On Nothingness,” the author addresses the concept of “empty space” while “Atoms” speculates about the existence of quarks and “extremely tiny one-dimensional ‘strings’ of energy.” Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding is “probably the most important cosmic discovery of all time,” and “we expect that the universe will keep expanding forever.” Elsewhere, Lightman writes that it’s “almost certain that life exists elsewhere in the universe.” Discussing visionary physicist Andrei Linde’s concept of a “map of the universes,” Lightman offers up this head-spinner: It’s “possible” that there are “multiple universes, each infinite in extent.” Some “might even have different dimensions than our own universe.”
A roaming, eye-opening, insightful, and literate collection of science writing.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4901-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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