An engrossing examination of an enigmatic genius.
The story of Russian mathematical prodigy Grigory Perelman, who solved a problem that had stumped everyone for a century—then walked away from his chosen field.
Gessen (Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, 2008, etc.) tells Perelman’s story from the viewpoint of a former student in the educational system of which he was a product. Soviet mathematicians worked in isolation from their Western counterparts during the Stalinist era, but were encouraged because of their value to the state. Perelman, an unusually gifted student, was identified early and his talent nurtured, even though, as a Jew, he faced crippling handicaps under the Soviets. He won the attention of an innovative math coach, Sergei Rukshin. The coach and student bonded early, and Perelman was accepted at a prestigious university and then at a top graduate school. As a star, he was allowed an unusual degree of eccentricity, which in his case included an almost total disregard of other people. Numerous contemporaries attest to his fanatical adherence to a set of ideals that essentially ignored the realities of the Soviet state. Politics, prejudice, making friends and getting ahead in the world—these meant nothing to Perelman. During postdoctoral work in the United States, he refused to cut his hair and nails and turned down job offers because he felt it beneath his dignity to apply for them. Meanwhile, he was homing in on a solution to the Poincaré Conjecture, a topological riddle so puzzling that the Clay Institute in Boston offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could solve it. When, in 2002, Perelman posted a solution on the Internet, he seemed to expect instant recognition. Instead, the world’s mathematicians meticulously checked his proof, which Perelman took it as an insult and turned down a Fields medal, the math equivalent of a Nobel. To this day, there is significant doubt about whether he will accept the Clay prize. Though Gessen was unable to interview her subject, she paints a fascinating picture of the Soviet math establishment and of the mind of one of its most singular products.
An engrossing examination of an enigmatic genius.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101406-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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