A hokey but inspiring blend of personal narrative and scientific exploration.
Mallett (Theoretical Physics/Univ. of Connecticut) chronicles his quest to build a time machine, sparked by grief over his father’s premature death, in 1955.
The author was only ten, the oldest of four children in a happy, aspiring African-American family, when his father died of a heart attack at age 33. Two years later, that tragedy took on a different meaning for young Ronald when he read Classics Illustrated No. 133, a comic-book version of H.G. Wells’s science-fiction classic, The Time Machine. Mallett became determined to build his own time machine so that he could return to the days before May 22, 1955, and save his father. He pursued this quest despite bouts of depression that almost forced him to drop out of school. Early encounters with racism, especially while stationed in the South during his Air Force service, made him focus more intently on acquiring advanced math and computer skills. Back in the civilian world, he entered Penn State, majoring in physics. Mallett kept his long-time goal a close secret, knowing that it would be an impediment to any serious scientific career. But careful study of Einstein’s relativity theory convinced him that his dream was actually possible. The author interweaves the story of his scientific career with the drive to make his sci-fi dream of time travel come true. Eventually, he found that colleagues Stephen Hawking, Frank Tipler and Kip Thorne were investigating special circumstances in which time appeared to move backwards. Mallett began to explore the gravitational effects of a laser beam following a circular path. After complex calculations, he found his theory, an extrapolation of Einstein’s work, accepted by other physicists. Although his pipe dream of returning to save his father remains beyond reach, Mallett has achieved a significant scientific breakthrough.
A hokey but inspiring blend of personal narrative and scientific exploration.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-869-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© 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.
