The same team that brought you Stephen Hawking: A life in Science has decided to defend Albert Einstein against assorted revisionist treatments. Principal among Einstein's critics are those who say Einstein's first wife, Mileva Maric, is not given credit for her contributions to special relativity theory and that, in general, she had a rough time. (Their illegitimate daughter was placed for adoption and subsequently lost to history; Einstein's mother loathed Mileva for her peasant origins, etc.) Since the authors find nothing good to say about her, quoting sources describing her as unattractive, distrustful, and noting that she never did get her degree, they can hardly be credited with unbiased views. On the other hand, they are prepared to say that Einstein himself may have suffered schizophrenia—following a notion of psychiatrist Anthony Storr that seems off the wall. Be that as it may, they do manage to bring off a colorful description of the life for which the adjective peripatetic hardly suffices. Poor Maleva and the later-born sons followed along, making do and making Poppa as comfortable as possible. The chapters interleave the life with popular accounts of the major work, underscoring the papers produced in 1905, the "annus mirabilus," that launched Einstein's reputation. The paper on the photelectric effect earned Einstein the Nobel in 1922—proceeds of which he had agreed years before to give to Maleva after their divorce. In due course, we meet the physicists and astronomers who would later verify the accuracy of general relativity by measuring the bending of starlight near the sun during an eclipse. Following Einstein's rejection of quantum theory in the 1920's, the authors trace the personal eclipse of Einstein's creative career and ascent to the role of elder statesman and charming Princeton eccentric. Certainly some new and interesting details here, and accurate, acessible explanations of theory. But please, Einstein's life needs no apology!
Pub Date: March 22, 1994
ISBN: 0743263898
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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