Sympathetic study of a man whose achievements were overshadowed by his inability to understand how science was changing.
Noted science writer Lindley (Boltzman’s Atom, 2001, etc.) chronicles the life of an eminent Victorian scientist, in his time considered second only to Newton.
The author picks up the career of William Thomson (1824–1907) upon his arrival at Cambridge. The young man’s father gave him an exceptional head start, taking the family on tours of the continent and teaching them advanced science. At age 16, William published a significant paper on heat flow, a subject soon to blossom into thermodynamics and become one of the foundations of classical physics. Thomson contributed significantly to thermodynamics, even giving it its name, but never developed a full-blown theory of heat. Inability to see the larger implications of his ideas was a characteristic shortcoming, despite an impressive record of success. Accepting a professorship at Glasgow, Thomson supplemented his academic income with practical ventures. He advised the company that laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable, in the process inventing an improved receiver. He developed a compass that became the British naval standard for 40 years. Work like this, which bolstered England’s economic and technological supremacy, led to Thomson’s elevation to the peerage as Lord Kelvin in 1892, the first British scientist to be so honored. But in his practical side lay the seeds of his downfall. Thomson questioned geologists’ estimates of the age of the earth after calculating (correctly, given the energy sources known at the time) that the sun’s total lifetime could be only a few million years. When the discovery of radioactivity showed a way out of the impasse, he refused to amend his position. This failure of imagination made him a scientific fossil, the embodiment of classical physics just as its edifice began to crumble. Lindley deftly interweaves accounts of Thomson’s scientific career, his relations with his contemporaries, and his personal life, always cocking an eye to the larger historical picture.
Sympathetic study of a man whose achievements were overshadowed by his inability to understand how science was changing.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-309-09073-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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 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
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