Walter Isaacson goes deeper into his life and Dennis Overbye into his work, but readers will find this shorter biography...
A prolific British science writer examines the creation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Special relativity—Einstein’s startling 1905 assertion that time and space are flexible, varying predictably according to one’s frame of reference—is easy, writes Gribbin (13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything, 2016, etc.). General relativity is considered much more difficult, but the author insists that anyone can understand Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity as a fourth dimensional distortion of space-time around any massive body. He exaggerates, but careful readers will understand most of this book, which, despite the title, is a fine account of Einstein’s life and work with modest emphasis on general relativity. Gribbin checks all the boxes. Born in a middle-class Jewish German family, Einstein was—despite the myth—a good if obstreperous student. He failed to obtain an academic position after his 1900 graduation from Swiss Federal Polytechnic because theoretical physics professorships were much more rare then, but it’s also a myth that the scientific establishment ignored him. Europe’s leading physics journal, Annalen der Physik, accepted all of his groundbreaking 1905 papers, but it had been accepting his papers since 1900. By 1908, he was a significant figure in the scientific community, and in 1914, Berlin’s pre-eminent Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics created a position especially for him. General relativity turned out to be so difficult for Einstein that he needed help from a mathematician friend to get it right, but it made him a scientific superstar. As Gribbin notes, he had “discovered a fundamental absolute truth about the universe…to rank with such fundamental mathematical truths as Pythagoras’ theorem.”
Walter Isaacson goes deeper into his life and Dennis Overbye into his work, but readers will find this shorter biography entirely satisfactory.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-212-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
