A fascinating portrait of a complex figure who ponders the place of man and God in the universe and who still loves the...
Ferguson (Pythagoras, 2010, etc.) brilliantly updates her 1991 children's biography of Stephen Hawking for an adult audience.
Hawking's work on black holes and the origins of the universe guarantees him a place in the scientific pantheon, but his ability to pursue scientific work despite the ravages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) have earned him superstar status. Diagnosed in 1962 with a prognosis that he would be dead within two years, he refused to be daunted. He continued his studies, married and fathered three children and made major contributions to our understanding of the universe, all while struggling to maintain his ability to function despite increasing muscular atrophy that prevented his use of his hands, confined him to a wheel chair and ultimately robbed him of his ability to speak. In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair once held by Isaac Newton. Now almost 70 and only able to communicate through a computer, he still maintains a busy lecture schedule. His latest book, The Grand Design (co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow), was published in 2010. Ferguson has relied on Hawking for guidance on scientific topics and on a memoir written by his ex-wife for details of life during their 25-year marriage. Her ability to write clearly about scientific issues using metaphor rather than mathematics makes this an excellent introduction to astrophysics for the interested layman.
A fascinating portrait of a complex figure who ponders the place of man and God in the universe and who still loves the “Eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before.”Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-34060-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
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