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
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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