Good astrophysics for committed readers.
An update on the early years of the cosmos.
In her first nonfiction book, Chapman reviews the history, including new discoveries which have overturned accepted theories on the evolution of the universe, but she reserves most of her excitement for the “dark ages”—from 380,000 to roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The early universe was a superheated soup of subatomic particles and energy. After nearly 400,000 years, the temperature had dropped enough to allow electrically neutral atoms to form and photons to travel freely. There was light and gas but nothing else. As it expanded and cooled, its matter—almost all hydrogen and helium—drifted about. Eventually, some clouds drifted together, and gravity began to pull. The clouds shrank and grew hotter, and a collapsing cloud grew so hot—millions of degrees—that its hydrogen became helium in a process known as fusion, which produces titanic amounts of energy. These were the first stars, born perhaps 180 million years after the Big Bang. Mostly brighter, hotter, bigger, and shorter-lived than today’s, they ended their lives and blew up, which produced “metals” (in astrophysics, elements other than hydrogen and helium) and scattered them, a process that formed other stars and eventually planets and humans. Do any primordial, metal-free stars still exist? The big ones are long gone, but small, sunlike stars have extremely long lifetimes. Evidence for their existence is turning up in obscure regions, such as dwarf galaxies and the outskirts of the Milky Way. Detecting them requires massive observatories, high-tech spectrographs, and the soon-to-be-launched $10 billion James Webb space telescope. Clearly fascinated by her subject, Chapman works diligently to describe the early universe, gradually introducing information about the life cycles of stars and techniques astrophysicists use to search for them. Her careful step-by-step explanations delve far deeper than a NOVA documentary, so readers must pay attention, but most will find it worth the effort.
Good astrophysics for committed readers.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4729-6292-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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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