Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.
Art and verse celebrating extreme cosmological phenomena.
Nobel Prize winner Thorne has been a notable theoretical physicist, author, and media scientist a la Carl Sagan for the past 50 years. Award-winning artist Halloran’s work features images that straddle the worlds of art and science. The result of nearly 20 years of collaboration, this is a lavish, vivid book dominated by Halloran’s dazzling, more or less representational paintings, accompanied by Thorne’s commentary, often in free verse. Although it lacks consistent rhyme and meter, free verse remains verbal music. No discerning reader—nor Thorne himself—would claim to find poetic mastery in his text, which might better be described as prose written with irregular margins. Nonetheless, the author’s descriptions serve their purpose, which is not to provide lessons in popular science but to explore spectacularly weird astrophysical phenomena and illustrate how they might affect a person experiencing them. Readers who skim the text in favor of the illustrations will not regret the experience, but they would do well to slow down later in the text, when Thorne converts to prose, offering a fine history of relativistic phenomena since Einstein pointed them out, along with a sketchy explanation of the science. Since Einstein, writes the author, “we physicists have studied the prediction of [his] laws in depth and have gradually learned that the universe has a rich warped side: its big bang birth, black holes, gravitational waves, and possibly wormholes, time machines, cosmic strings and naked singularities, and almost certainly some huge surprises.” Readers seeking a deeper understanding should consult Thorne’s 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps, in which he makes a sincere attempt to explain difficult concepts such as warped space and flexible time as well as bizarre cosmological wonders that definitely exist (black holes, gravity waves) and those that may not (worm holes, time travel).
Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781631498541
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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