LitPundit Home of all things literary

Erik Spanberg reviews the latest biography on Albert Einstein, "Einstein: His Life and Universe" over at Christian Science Monitor.

To Isaacson's credit, Einstein: His Life And Universe conveys the dizzying concepts of physics in a way most lay readers (this one certainly qualifies as that) can grasp. For example, when explaining Einstein's equation of speed and mass, he notes the enormity of converting matter into energy with powerful simplicity. The energy in the mass of one raisin, he writes, could supply most of New York City's energy needs for an entire day.

While everyone has at least a fuzzy knowledge of Einstein – the shock of unkempt hair, the use of his name as a synonym for genius and an enduring, iconic pop-culture familiarity – much of his basic biography is at least unexamined and probably unknown, as well, by the mainstream audience Isaacson's book targets. It is a story, and life, every bit as remarkable as the landmark physics theories proffered by Einstein.

Joan Acocella reviews Darren Wershler-Henry's interesting book on typewriters, " The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting", over at The New Yorker.

Wershler-Henry follows the fortunes of the typewriter into the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the role of women in the story (...)

Wershler-Henry covers these matters in the first half of his book. But he is a scholar of the postmodern persuasion, and, as he soon tells us, his interest is not in the typewriter’s history but in its “discourse.” In the postmodern vocabulary, this means the web of assumptions that collect around a cultural fact, with heavy emphasis on notions that have been unmasked as naive and ridiculous by Frenchtheorists.

In particular Acocella laments that while Wershler-Henry spends time exploring the experience with the typewriter, he does not "spend much time on the difference between that and our relationship to the personal computer."

a wonderfully accomplished work which charts the remarkable Spanish cultural diaspora

Peter Preston reviewing Henry Kamen's "The Disinherited" goes on to add

For while the empire road ran outwards and onwards, constantly extending the influence (and often ruthless power) of Madrid throughout the Americas, so the supposed nation at the dark heart of it all struggled for identity and self-belief. The questions were implicit, but insistent. Who are we Spaniards? What binds us together? Is there a true Hispanic culture, or only a void that cruelty and consuming passions compete to fill?

Scientific works are not highlighted enough at LitPundit, or so the complaint goes. The main reason for this is that it is not strictly literature but then biographies are. So here goes...

Tony Rothman reviewing Siobhan Roberts's new biography of geometer Donald Coxeter titled " King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry" seems to fall into the expected trap of reviewing the subject of the biography rather than the work itself.

No, the excitement in Coxeter's life was internal. His métier was classical geometry—the study of those solids we encounter in high school, such as dodecahedra and icosahedra. But he found three dimensions confining. With little but his mind's eye to illuminate the terrain, Coxeter climbed into the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth dimensions to explore, construct and classify geometric objects according to their symmetry properties.

Luckily for prospective readers, the 'fall' is not complete and the review does go on to to cover the book!

This last challenge is easier to deal with. Roberts has evidently heeded the famous dictum that contributed to Stephen Hawking's success, that every equation in a popular book halves the readership. She goes light on the mathematics and, what's more, is...

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Over at New York Times, Leon Wieseltier reviews Sari Nusseibeh's Once Upon a Country.

“Once Upon a Country” is a deeply admirable book by a deeply admirable man. It is largely a political memoir, about a reluctantly political Palestinian trying to bring politics to his people, as the forces of occupation, religion and terrorism interfere with the very possibility of politics. Nusseibeh’s book is written out of a refreshingly candid awareness that the reasons for the persistence of the Palestinians in their stateless misery are multiple and complicated. He is the very rare participant in the Israeli-Palestinian disputation who does not spend himself in fits of self-justification; the rights and the wrongs, in his view, are cruelly distributed across all the sides in this apparently ceaseless conflict.

Adam Mars-Jones is not too impressed with Norman Mailer's first novel in a decade or so. In a review at The Guardian he says

The book is highly impressive for long stretches, but its flaws are perverse and even preposterous. It dies the death of a thousand cuts from self-inflicted wounds to intelligibility, but the punctures are all in the insistent, maddeningly silly cosmological framework.

(...)

There has never been a shortage of embittered fantasists, after all. The cautionary part of the story is the one that Mailer doesn't tell, the process whereby one such figure managed to impose himself on a society supersaturated with grievance and rancour.

The Economist reviews James Attlee's "Isolarion" favorably

James Attlee’s scholarly, reflective, and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road is one of the best travel books that has been written about Britain’s oldest university city. It is not—at least not directly—the Oxford of punts and gowns. His raw material is diversity: the Cowley Road as a corner of the outside world, where change and excitement are squeezed into the cramped hinterland of the scholarly theme park of the city centre.

You can read an excerpt of the book at University of Chicago Press website.

Justin Cartwright reviews J. M. Coetzee's latest non-fiction "Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005"

It is literary criticism of the highest order. And the title is apt, because what Coetzee does is never superficial or opportunist; this is a close examination of the way the writers he is discussing work, and the historical and cultural context in which they work, and it is informed by a breathtakingly wide understanding of their influences and preoccupations.

If you are a fan of Jorge Borges and would like to find out more about the great Argentine literary genius, you have found the right book in "With Borges" by Alberto Manguel. One may be hard pressed to call it a book - at 77 pages of rather large text, it is more like a long narrative or a booklet. Yet, despite its short length, the book succeeds wonderfully in painting a rich and colorful picture of the life and literary pursuits of Borges.

Manguel manages to write a personal account, inviting the reader to a journey few would have been privileged to make. Manguel was one of the several people who had read out to Borges, after he succumbed to blindness in his adulthood. Manguel does not consider himself unique, admitting that there exists a vast group of people like himself, "minor Boswells whose identities are rarely known to one another but who collectively hold the memory of one of the world's greatest readers". And it is a generous piece of this personal memory that he shares with us, in this intense and intimate account of the great man.

The author opens the window... Continue reading

"Letters to a Young Mathematician" by Ian Stewart is a delightful small book written in the form of a collection of letters from a fictitious mathematician to his equally fictitious mentee Meg, as she charts her career in mathematics. It is a fascinating look into what mathematics is, what it takes and means to be a mathematician and what (and how) they think. As stated by the author in the 'Preface':

Letters to a Young Mathematician is my attempt to bring some parts of "A Mathematician's Apology" up to date, namely, those parts that might influence the decisions of a young person contemplating a degree in mathematics and a possible career in the subject.

Though the book might be of best use to someone who is at the crossroads, deciding on his/her area of further studies, it does not prevent others, like me, from having a new found (or rekindled) insight into the world of mathematics. Starting with the first letter titled "Why Do Math", in which the writer explains how mathematics can be found all around us, he goes on to explain how high school students are disillusioned by the arithmetic in mathematics' clothing they... Continue reading