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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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