Despite a generous index of biographical sketches, a glossary of scientific terms, and copious footnotes, this is still...
Astrophysicists are people, too. And that’s not always a good thing.
Such was the harsh lesson learned by 20-year-old prodigy Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—known as Chandra—when on Jan. 11, 1935, he rose before the august Royal Astronomical Society in London to announce his discovery that certain oversized stars would inexorably collapse into themselves to the point of nothingness. The young Indian graduate student expected to be lauded for his achievement. Instead, the most renowned British astrophysicist of the day, Sir Arthur Eddington, who had been Chandra’s inspiration and mentor, promptly ridiculed the finding, setting off a feud with the stunned Chandra that effectively halted his work on the subject for 40 years. In this scholarly, richly footnoted story, Miller (History and Philosophy of Science/University College, London; Einstein, Picasso, 2002) focuses on Chandra’s long struggle to overcome the setback of Eddington’s attack. (Chandra was later recruited by Enrico Fermi to the faculty at the University of Chicago, and in 1983 he received the Nobel Prize.) But in the process, he also introduces us to astrophysics research from the 1930s to the present, and to the often prickly, turf-guarding scientists behind them. The portraits of Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, along with many others, are fascinating as we follow their gaze from the stars deep in space to the microcosmos of atomic particles. Their realization that the answers to the life and death of stars could be found in the protons and electrons of the atom led to breathtaking discoveries—finally affirming Chandra’s theory on “black holes” as well as on the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Chandra himself chafed throughout his life under the prejudice he suffered as a nonwhite scientist.
Despite a generous index of biographical sketches, a glossary of scientific terms, and copious footnotes, this is still dense reading, aimed more at the scientifically inclined than the general reader. The rewards for the diligent, however, are many and profound.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-34151-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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