Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved...
Hawking (co-author: The Grand Design, 2010 etc.) briefly examines his life and his well-earned celebrity status—“partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius.”
Although he is now almost completely immobilized by the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), the author looks back on his life with “quiet satisfaction,” with both his personal life and also due to his major contributions to understanding the relationship between the origins of our universe and the existence of black holes. He writes convincingly of the past 50 years: “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics.” He describes his early fascination with electric trains and the complex board games that he invented as early manifestations of his drive to understand how systems work and how to control them. Just as he was beginning his doctoral work at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with ALS and given only two years to live. Until that time, his academic career had been unremarkable, and he admits to affecting a typical student pose at the time: being bored with life. Eventually, though, his life took on a new zest, especially after he became engaged to his first wife. By 1979, when their third child was born, he had made his mark with a series of groundbreaking discoveries, and he occupied the prestigious position of Cambridge's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a chair originally held by Isaac Newton). His first popular work on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1988), became a widely translated, global best-seller.
Hawking's candid explanation of how his ideas about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes have evolved ends with intriguing hints on the current direction of his thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53528-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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