Stellar research and prose combine in a splendid biography of physics’ most luminous supernova.
A comprehensive, sympathetic and very readable portrait of the man, the celebrity, the scientist and the theories that transformed physics and the modern world.
Neffe, a German journalist specializing in scientific topics, is supremely qualified for his complex task. Although Albert Einstein (1879–1955) lived his final decades in Princeton after fleeing Nazi Germany, he never learned much English and suffered numerous indignities in his adopted country. Marginalized by the new generation of physicists, surveilled by the ever-suspicious J. Edgar Hoover, he never managed to complete his work on unified theory. Neffe begins with the greatest indignity of all: the autopsy at which a pathologist removed and absconded with Einstein’s brain and an ophthalmologist his eyes. The narrative then backtracks to “His Second Birth” as a scientific star in 1919, then provides a steady chronological account moving from ancestry to birth to death. Neffe pauses occasionally to clarify such intellectual matters as Einstein’s celebrated “thought experiments,” his theories of special and general relativity, his distaste for the uncertainties of quantum mechanics; some of these sections are dense and difficult. The biographer carefully and compassionately explores Einstein’s personality, which remained childlike throughout his life. Twice married, he was unable to be much of a husband or father; he repeatedly failed to credit colleagues; he sometimes leaped without looking into turbulent waters of public debate. Though he saw the need for force against Hitler, he was a lifelong pacifist and predicted the horrors of nuclear confrontation. In later chapters, Neffe explores Einstein’s astonishing, enduring celebrity and finds opportunities to both credit and damn the United States. Americans helped popularize the physicist and his theories; they admired him for his belief in God; and they also called him a “commie” and treated him like Cassandra.
Stellar research and prose combine in a splendid biography of physics’ most luminous supernova.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-14664-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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