A pleasure for science students and particularly of science humanely practiced.
An epistolary memoir from a leading postwar physicist and mathematician, taking in the era from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s.
World War II was an excellent time to get an education, writes English-born physicist Dyson (Dreams of Earth and Sky, 2015, etc.), a longtime professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton: “The famous old professors were all there, but there were hardly any students.” Nonetheless, the war exerted some pull on his studies; in this collection of letters, he writes of operational research on detecting U-boats and such. Still, he heeded the advice of a senior professor who told him that “research never mixes well with learning,” and he set to puzzling out his own problems in quantum electrodynamics, particle theory, and other fields. A dozen years on, he recorded, happily, that as a result of one experiment, “we now have the job of changing our theories to agree with the new information, and this is likely to lead to substantial progress.” That passage is characteristic, for Dyson reveals himself to be wedded not to preconceived notions but to the primacy of proof, whether it be of that spinning particle or of the identity of a bomber on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969. “Undoubtedly,” he writes, “the radical students will be blamed for it.” The author’s account of events in the laboratory is punctuated by detours into popular culture (seeing, for instance, the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre on release in 1948 and finding in it “fairly obvious application to present-day international relations”) and contemporary intellectual history such as the debut work of sociologist Amitai Etzioni. Advocates of science will find in Dyson an admirable model. Why go to Mars when we could irrigate the Sahara, he asks. The science of space travel may be 10 times the benefit in the end, he writes, but “the main purpose is a general enlargement of human horizons.”
A pleasure for science students and particularly of science humanely practiced.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-386-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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