A chorus of adulatory voices sings the praises of the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but fortunately the voice that rings loudest and clearest is Feynman's. Popularizers of the scientist's life are quick to mention the pleasure he derived from and the competence he displayed on the bongos, but he never beat the drum for his genius the way the myth- makers here do. Hardly a discouraging word is heard from the colleagues (Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann), the family (sister Joan, grateful for his encouragement of her own Ph.D. pursuits, wife Gweneth, and their children), the artists and sidekicks, the friends and barkeepers. None of them are nearly as interesting as Feynman's own descriptions of his life and work. Particularly noteworthy is his account of how he mastered hard subjects as a boy by reading into the text as far as he could go, then rereading and rereading so he could go farther each time. In another striking passage he describes how he visualizes the world of jiggling atoms and how the jiggles explain phenomena as varied as heat and magnetism. These moments illuminate Feynman's remarkable intuition about how the world works. Math in the abstract did not appeal; what he did was invent the math needed to get the physics right. All of this should be extraordinarily interesting to educators, psychologists, and historians of science, since it provides key insights into the mind of the man who invented the famous F. diagrams but whose curiosity also turned to computers, the invention of the world's smallest motors, and the study of art. Colleagues provide additional reflections, and the recreational and travel tales are the stuff of myth. (Filmmaker Sykes has made two documentaries about Feynman.) But the real meat—and the book's worth—resides in the master's words.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03621-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
