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 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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