Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more...
A brief biography of “the greatest mind of the modern age” and his revolutionary ideas.
The 2005 PBS Nova episode “Einstein’s Big Idea” was based on science writer and former Oxford professor Bodanis’ bestselling book. Here, the author takes a similar cinematic approach: the narrative is swift, focusing on personalities and simplifying complex ideas, which often works but occasionally converts science to the usual TV magic show. Bodanis passes quickly over his subject’s early years, including 1905, when Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. The author emphasizes that if Einstein had never been born, a contemporary would have made those discoveries, but it might have taken generations and several geniuses to duplicate his 1915 paper that converted the simple concepts of special relativity into the fiercely complex unification of mass, energy, space, and gravity that was general relativity. “What Einstein discovered,” writes Bodanis, “in the chill of wartime Berlin, was the greatest breakthrough in understanding the physical universe since Newton: an achievement for all time.” Einstein’s equations predicted an expanding universe. Since the 1915 universe was considered static, he added a “cosmological constant” to correct it, only to discard it when astronomers later discovered it was expanding. Although this was a mistake, Bodanis convincingly argues that it provoked a greater mistake. Einstein created general relativity from his own thoughts. On the single occasion he accepted scientific evidence, it was wrong. When quantum mechanics became accepted after 1920, he dissented. Certain that all matter obeyed precise laws, he rejected increasing evidence that subatomic particle behavior defied common sense. By the 1930s, this rejection placed him outside mainstream physics, where he remained, largely ignored, until his death.
Shorter than the best biographies of Einstein (by Walter Isaacson and Dennis Overbye) but still engaging and with more emphasis on the difficulties the scientist faced when physics moved away from the classical view he never abandoned.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-80856-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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