Superstar physicist Hawking—whose A Brief History of Time (1988) is ensconsed in the Guinness Book of Records for having had the longest bestseller-run in English-language history—returns with 11 essays and one interview, covering matters autobiographical, scientific, and philosophical. The autobiographical pieces share a sketchy, conversational tone and drop a few tasty nuggets: Hawking didn't learn to read until he was eight and proved to be (in the Einstein tradition) a mediocre student; if dropped on a desert island, he would listen to Mozart's Requiem and read Middlemarch. But even so, these pieces keep Hawking's inner life strictly under wraps. Most of the other essays, which tend to repeat themselves, cover the author's major scientific insights: that the universe is "neither created nor destroyed''; that space/time began 15 billion years ago and is finite but boundless, like the surface of a globe. Hawking cites as his "most surprising discovery'' the realization that black holes are not self-enclosed but leak particles and radiation: This leads directly to his most recent enthusiasm, ``baby universes,'' generated by black holes, which branch off from our own universe and sometimes return to it. Sometimes the going is thick ("the N=8 theory has twenty-eight spin-1 particles''), but most of Hawking's arguments will be clear to educated laypeople. His weak suit is philosophy, and, indeed, he includes a mild-mannered attack on professional philosophers, many of whom find his discussions of the big questions—what is creation? does God exist?—to be, as he puts it, "naive and simple-minded.'' No matter: Hawking will be remembered for his physics, not his metaphysics. Not much new, but people feel smarter just by buying a Hawking book. This will sell.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-553-09523-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
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