1 comments about Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.

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   "While everyone else was praising his [Dr. Stephen Hawking's] courage [since S. Hawking is seriously disabled by a motor neuron disease called ALS, commonly labeled Lou Gehrig's disease] and brilliance [in theoretical physics]...she [the organizer of this event honoring S. Hawking] had said to herself that there must be someone equally courageous behind him or he simply would not be here."
   
   The above is found in this interesting, extremely well written and sometimes humorous book authored by Dr. Jane Hawking who was Stephen Hawking's wife for more than twenty-five years.
   
   Be aware that this book "is a heavily revised version (with new material) of [J. Hawking's 1999 book or memoir called] `Music to the Stars.'" Hawking herself calls this book "the abridged version of the original memoir."
   
   I chose the quotation that begins this review because it's absolutely true! She saw S. Hawking progress from a person that could walk with a cane and talk to a person that became wheelchair bound and eventually could not talk. (He now uses a speech synthesizer.) Through this period of time, she had to oversee and arrange for his 24/7, 365 days a year care that, as chronicled in this book, was an enormous task fraught with hardship and economic difficulty. This was made even more difficult when the Hawking children eventually came along since she was stretched to the limit. At one point, she even had to make a life and death decision! Despite the hardships, she was no slouch. She earned a Ph.D. in Spanish medieval linguistics!
   
   She also saw his meteoric rise to fame after the publication of his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time." Even though there was no financial difficulty now, she still had to be concerned with his care.
   
   This book, to be sure, eloquently describes the hardships and details J. Hawking's impressions. But the book also delves into such things as the following:
   
   British life in general and academic life in particular, history, politics, disability issues, music, the Hawking travels to other countries, personalities of others especially scientists, and science.
   
   This book (excluding the epilogue or "postlude") covers the period before the Hawkings were married in July 1965 to July 1993. The very informative but brief postlude was written in February 2007 where we are told that the author is presented with another "demanding challenge." This postlude includes a May 2007 Post Script.
   
   I should say that at no point in this book is Jane Hawking vindictive toward her former husband.
   
   Finally, roughly in the book's center are almost 30 black and white photographs. My favorite is the very last one showing the author and two of her grown children with Stephen after the presentation of yet another award in November 2006.
   
   In conclusion, in Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time" he tells us, "I was...fortunate in that I chose theoretical physics, because that is all in the mind. So my disability has not been a serious handicap." This inspiring book by Jane Hawking shows how Stephen Hawking was fortunate enough to have had a good and dedicated wife to help his genius bloom!!
   
   (first published 2007; 4 parts or 57 chapters; postlude; main narrative 405 pages; acknowledgements)
   
   <>
   
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No comments about Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Biography Of An Archaeologist.

No comments about The Chequered Career of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler: First Superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey (Three Centuries of Science in America).

2 comments about Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb.

1. This is an important story about the people who played key roles in the development of nuclear weapons. The interplay of intellectual challenge, moral reluctance, and fear of the enemy is examined in detail for numerous key players. The politics of weapons development is intertwined.



2. Even if you've read many of the A-bomb books (as I have), you'll find a new angle here. That angle involves the personalities of 9 of the physicists who were swept from their idyllic careers of research and teaching to create the atomic bomb. Virtually everyone of them lives to regret their participation in the Manhattan Project, with the notable exception of Edward Teller. Teller, of course, goes on to develop the H-bomb in the early 1950's and is despised by most of his former atomic bomb colleagues.
   Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bethe, Bohr, Teller, Lawrence, Compton, Rabi, Szillard. By book's end these will be more than names and faces; these 9 very different, very complicated men came together for a couple of short years and were forever linked. In 1943 they thought they were saving the world. By 1946 most were afraid they may have destroyed it. VanDeMark has done a marvelous job of fitting 9 biographies into a very readable, not overly long book.

1 comments about Marconi.

1. This is a strange little book which offers no insight into the way Marconi thought about the technical aspects of radio or about many of the interesting issues associated with the early history of the Marconi Company. There are several photographs of early radio equipment but there is no discussion of what functions the devices have. There are no circuit diagrams. There are many pictures of Marconi and various notables; none of these are of archival value. If the reader wishes to learn more about how Marconi lost his eye, or about his extensive sexual adventures I recommend this book. If however the reader is a serious student of the history of radio I suggest the two volumes by Hugh G.J.Aitken or the History of the Marconi Company are much more valuable and interesting.

2 comments about Marconi My Beloved.

1. This book was originally written (and reprinted several times) in Italian by the wife of Inventor and Statesman Guglielmo Marconi, and in recent years was translated to english by his daughter Elettra, who also added some important recollections. Guglielmo Marconi was the first to discover how to send a sound made in one box, to another box on the other side of the room.
   This technology was then used by others, as it still is today, in inventions that involve wireless communication, such as satellite communication and radios.
   He was Nobel Prize winner. He was credited with saving the lives of survivors on the Titanic because he installed the radio transmission on that ship. He conceived of, and built the Vatican Radio Station which is still a powerful communications tool for the world's millions of Roman Catholics.
   Read it!



2. Who invented the wireless radio? Well as we are taught in history class Marconi did. Now what else do we know about him? More or less very little, that was until now. This book is an exceptional look into one of this century greatest men.

   Written by Marconi's wife, this book is more than a simple biography, it is a love story, and it is a romance novel and most importantly it is history lesson all rolled into 370 plus pages of one of the best books I have ever read or reviewed.

   The books tells more than the life work of the "man who gave voice to silence", it shows another side, this side history books never record. The book includes letter, pictures and even a listing of his honors.

   Here is a book that should be on the must read list for those interested in history. I was truly impressed by the way the author makes the man come to life and shows his triumphs and his failures. Excellent reading for one and all!

1 comments about Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society) (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society).

1. Humphry Davy was an experimental chemist of considerable renown and received highest honors from his contemporaries for his work and discoveries in the then fledgling science of chemistry. After his death in 1829, his life and manifold accomplishments continued to impress the academic community. His achievements include the discoveries of the scientifically novel, isolation and identification of seven new elements, association of electrical properties and chemical behavior, and ability to popularize the excitement of chemistry with both colleagues and the general public through his skills as a lecturer. He invented the miners' safety lamp (and refused to profit financially from his life-saving discovery); and throughout his career worked tirelessly for the benefit of the people. Young Humphry Davy: The Making Of An Experimental Chemist is an exceptionally well researched, deftly written, totally engaging biography of a most remarkable and accomplished man of science in his early days at Penzance, Bristol, and London.

No comments about The Britannica Guide to the 100 Most Influential Scientists.

1 comments about Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto (Sky & Telescope Observer's Guides).

1. When this book was first published by the University of Arizona Press back in 1991, I happened to be in a small bookstore when in walked Eugene Shoemaker. This was before the names of Shoemaker and Levy had been publicly linked in the name of a famous comet. Shoemaker spotted this book on the shelf and exclaimed happily: "Look! They've got David Levy's book on Clyde Tombaugh!" I vaguely recall that he even picked up the book and eagerly showed it to a friend. No doubt Shoemaker would be pleased that Sky and Telescope Books has now 'got' this book back into print.
   
   While David Levy may be better known as an astronomer than as a biographer, he has a couple of stronger-than-usual qualifications to write Tombaugh's biography: he knew Tombaugh over many years and got Tombaugh's cooperation for this book, and he appreciates better than anyone what an extraordinary task it was for Tombaugh to search through a large portion of the sky, both before and after the Pluto discovery.
   
   Clyde Tombaugh took a unique arc through the world of astronomy. Lowell Observatory hired him precisely because he was a Kansas farm boy without academic qualifications and would be thrilled to work for peanuts on a task that most astronomers considered futile. Tombaugh was indeed thrilled by the chance to observe the sky full-time. He was motivated by a basic deep love of astronomy that never left him amidst all the twists and frustrations of his further career. There are few biographies of astromoners in which the sheer joy of astronomy speaks so clearly. Levy also does justice to the scientific challenges involved in searching for Pluto. But Tombaugh's systematic sky survey had larger, cosmological implications: he was seeing the clumpy distribution of galaxies and challenged Edwin Hubble's opinion that the galaxies were distributed more uniformly. Tombaugh also had an adventure in pioneer rocketry, spending several years at White Sands in the 1950s, helping Von Braun's team develop some basic techniques that would become familiar to the public watching the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs.
   
   I put Levy's biography to a unique, tough test. I read it after visiting the small town in Kansas from which Tombaugh came. I spoke with Tombaugh's nephew and with locals who had known the Tombaugh family. I went through the local newspaper file and and visited the school Tombaugh attended (and I even showed the latest issue of Sky and Telescope, with its cover story on Pluto, to Mrs. Miller's third grade class). I visited the now-abandoned Tombaugh farmstead and found the weed-hidden cement telescope mount Tombaugh had built for the telescope he used to make the drawings for which Lowell Observatory hired him. After such a personal exposure, there's a danger that a biography will fall short, ringing false in emphasis or slipping up on various details. But it's clear that Levy got to know Tombaugh pretty well. More importantly, he turns Tombaugh into an Everyman Hero for anyone who finds astronomy to be an adventure.

2 comments about Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (Labor and Social Change).

1. Although attempts to profile female contributions to great undertakings are appreciated, �Their day in the sun,� is fundamentally flawed by the authors� bias toward academic, primarily physicist, researchers and by the authors� failure to understand the mechanisms and downstream effects of Manhattan Project technologies. This has lead to a poorly organized document that spends pages on the contributions of a truck driver, secretary, or clerk whose husband was a Los Alamos or Chicago Met Lab physicist while ignoring the contributions of the tens of thousands of women who worked at other facilities, often in professional scientific or engineering capabilities. This is partially due to the uniqueness and historic significance of the atom bomb. However, other successes growing out of the Manhattan Project touch our lives every day: the medical isotopes that delineate a blocked heart artery, the separations that make good vaccines and new plastics possible, and the nuclear power reactors that remain our cleanest electric energy generators.

   The authors indicate that the limitations on their research imposed by the availability of published documents or potential interviewees were responsible for their omissions. However, in preparing reviews of the technology developed at a variety of Manhattan Project sites, my working group found reasonable access to both people and written records. Also, epidemiological researchers who have evaluated clinical effects, mortality, and morbidity of Manhattan project staff have been able to contact significant portions of former workers. Recent epidemiological studies of �female� illnesses (e. g., breast cancer) make the omission of the bulk of the Manhattan Project�s female staff for reasons other than bias or intellectual laxness difficult to understand.




2. This work chronicles the role that women played in the Manhatten project during World War II in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, health biology, etc. It also provides an interesting account of the role of women in the physics discoveries during the early twentieth century which made the development of nuclear weapons possible.

   This book is especially valuable since this information has not been treated in any kind of systematic way in any previous historical accounts of the Manhatten project.