1 comments about Who's Who in Fluorescence 2003.

1. Excellent initiative which no doubt will benefit our community of researchers tremendously.

1 comments about Billy's Halo: Love, Science and My Father's Death.

1. Ruth McKernan has written a moving book on the death of her father. She does this both as someone who sees what is happening as a clear-eyed scientist and as a devoted daughter. She has produced a remarkably fine book, we are all in her debt.

No comments about Huxley's Autobiography and Essays.

2 comments about Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives.

1. This book is an excellent introduction to Einstein - if one happens to be a theoretical physicist with an IQ of 186. In other words, this book is abstruse in the extreme. The essays describing Einstein's theories depend heavily on formulas and equations. This begs the question, "so what is the book for?" Other sections of the book dealing with Einstein and the Bomb draw from Einstein's letters, which is good, but the letters really speak for themselves anyway. The section I thought might interest me, Einstein's perspective on language and thought, turned out to be a bunch of psychobabble that obviously comprises someone's ill-conceived thesis. The tone of the book, furthermore, is sickeningly sycophantic. We all recognize Einstein as a great man. What a pity that this book doesn't bring us any closer to knowing why. The picture on the cover, however, is precious. It looks like Inspector Clouseau on the trail of the dreaded Library Fine Evader. I do not recommend this book to any but scholars who've already read everything else on the subject.



2. Einstein is certainly one of the most beautiful and concise thinkers of all time. His most famous equations contain fewer than ten characters and can be jotted down in a few seconds. Their implications are still being drawn out by physicists and mathematicians. What many people fail to understand is that Einstein was also an incredibly deep and poetic student of metaphysics and spiritual life. Such sayings as "God does not play Dice," and "God is crafty, but He is not malicious," are both deep and whimsical. This book celebrates this complementary cultural side of the Great Man.
   
   This book does not avoid the complexities of quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, but the reader can easily skip over the equations. The reader who comes away wanting more can turn to Abraham Pais' biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, and Alice Calaprice's compendium of Einstein's sayings.

No comments about The Book of My Life: De Vita Propia Liber.

1 comments about Jacques Cousteau: Man of the Oceans (Rookie Biographies).

1. A biography of the French ocean explorer written for the very young in short sentences ("Jacques Cousteau is a real person. He was born in 1910. He has learned and taught about life underwater"- at p. 3). Ironically, the photographic captions require a higher level of reading; that on p. 9, for example, notes that "Jacques Cousteau would grow up to use machines, such as the windship Aleyone, and to make films of his exploits and underwater adventures." One wonders whether words like "regulator" and "aqualung" are appropriate to the age group targeted, at least without further explanation. At least one photograph, that on page ten entitled "A French navy ship gives a 21-gun salute as it enters the harbor at Havana, Cuba" has nothing to do with Cousteau, while it seems foolish to identify Bernard Delmotte in a picture (at p. 31), but not to name the co-inventor of the aqualung ("A man in Paris helped him"- at p. 16). Similarly, many of the photographs are not parallel to the text. The account of an amphora wreck off Grand Conglove is illustrated by two statuettes found off Greece (at p. 23), while although wars and typhoons are mentioned in the text, the picture offered is that of the Calypso in a blizzard (at p. 34).
   
   Greene incorrectly indicates that Cousteau did not help clear enemy mines after World War II (at p. 17), gives the wrong date for Philippe Cousteau's death (1979, not 1978), and confuses the aircraft involved with the accident which was a flying boat, not a helicopter (at p. 41).

No comments about Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist.

No comments about A Calendar of the Correspondence of Sir John Herschel.

1 comments about Marie Curie (Mujeres en la historia series).

1. This series is excellent. It provides a sketch of the main accomplishments of women in world history. Marie Curie's studies of radioactivity led to her death, but she left us with a new realm of science. It is a book for the young and the old, male and female, anyone who wants to get a glimpse at the life of important people in history. That it is written in Spanish is an added bonus. Libraries should own the entire series, for the many Hispanics who crave a rounded education.

No comments about The Life And Letters Of Charles Darwin V2: Including An Autobiographical Chapter.