Solid but plodding, like its exemplary subject.
Serviceable life of the autodidact’s autodidact, bringing recognition to a chap all but forgotten for the last couple of hundred years.
Thomas Young (1773–1829) was not someone you’d want to go up against on Jeopardy! Indeed, writes British science journalist Robinson, the London Science Museum opines that “Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history. He made discoveries in nearly every field he studied.” Among his contributions were advances in the wave theory of light, for which Young squared off against the orthodox Newtonian physicists of his day (thanks to Einstein, both Newton and Young can be viewed as sort of right), and his discovery of how the eye focuses on objects at different distances. Add to that his mastering dozens of languages, inventing the category “Indo-European” along the way, developing of a rule of thumb for adjusting adult dosages of medications for children’s use, and inventing a method of tuning a harpsichord, and deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it becomes clear that Young was an uncommon force who little deserves the obscurity into which he has fallen. Save, of course, that yesterday’s revolutionaries become today’s establishment become tomorrow’s deposed fuddy-duddies, which is just what happened; in his own time, Young, accused of committing “gratuitous fictions” in his work on the physics of light, lost ground to nose-to-the-grindstone types who had more patience for the hard, dull work of endless experimentation. Robinson varies, not always successfully, between dumbing down the science and plunging full-tilt into arcana, and many linguists will still want to give pride of place to Champollion on the matter of the Rosetta Stone. Still, he gives a good account of Young, who emerges in the end as something of a proto-nerd, brilliant but not much fun in company, incapable of telling a joke but able to explain the world.
Solid but plodding, like its exemplary subject.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-13-134304-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pi Press/Pearson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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