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
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
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
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