An extended New Yorker–style profile of a public figure who is charismatic and interesting enough to deserve a fuller...
An odd but appealing portrait of an Academy Award–winning sound editor fascinated with a simple 18th-century equation that predicts the distance of planets and satellites from the central body.
Called Bode’s law, its predictions are accurate—most of the time; sometimes it fails. As illustrated in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995), critic and journalist Weschler (Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, 2011, etc.) has a taste for talented eccentrics, and Walter Murch (b. 1943), who has worked on Apocalypse Now, the Godfather films, The English Patient, and other acclaimed films, certainly qualifies. A brilliant polymath and perhaps the world’s most respected film and sound editor, Murch has been nominated for nine Academy Awards and won three. Although his impressive Wikipedia entry fails to mention it, Murch has devoted 20 years to a private crusade promoting Bode’s law in lectures, writing, and correspondence. Encountering him five years ago, Weschler was converted, and he devotes this slim volume to explaining Murch’s efforts and interviewing scientists who are almost universally dismissive. “Numerology,” one commented. Readers will have no trouble understanding the Bode equation, the mathematics of which is simple high school algebra. The author is convincing in his argument that the scientific establishment has treated Murch unfairly. There’s no denying that some objections are petty—e.g., Murch’s lack of academic training in the subject. There’s also no denying that working scientists have plenty of experience with crackpots who obsessively promote one big idea. In fact, gravity and processes of planetary formation lead to some surprising regularities. Working astronomers don’t ignore Bode’s law but consider it an ingenious ad hoc invention that doesn’t adequately explain anything.
An extended New Yorker–style profile of a public figure who is charismatic and interesting enough to deserve a fuller biography.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-718-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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 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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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