jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

I don't have much to add to the general praise this book has gotten. The writing was sparkling from beginning to end, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't understand every tenth word. The first third or so seemed to meander but then it took off and all came together in the end. The book was as much about the horrors of Trujillo as it was about outsiders in America, of which being an immigrant was only part, together with other ingredients from Tolkien, role playing games, obesity, and an unrequited romantic. Ultimately, the novel lived up to its grandiose billing.

An inspired choice to do a paired biography of George Gamow and Max Max Delbrück. They were both born at the turn of the century, one in Russia and one in Germany, both started in quantum mechanics and then branched out -- Gamow to nuclear physics and cosmology and Delbrück much further afield to biology. And hovering over both of them from the beginning to nearly the end of the book is Niels Bohr and the "spirit of Copenhagen".

One of the things this book conveys most beautifully is how Gamow and Delbrück in their different ways created new circles of scientists in their adopted country of the United States, bringing together different disciplines that rarely worked together and pushing them forward onto new questions that had never been asked before. The results were breakthroughs in the nuclear physics of the creation of atoms in the big bang (in Gamow's case) and the forerunners of DNA theory (in Delbrück's case).

What is particularly interesting about focusing on Gamow and Delbrück, as opposed to say Einstein or Heisenberg or Watson, is how much they got wrong. But they got it wrong in interesting ways that led to new discoveries and theories that were right.

Gino Segre does a good job of shifting between the two and shifting between biography, historical context, and science. Highly recommended -- although not as good as Segre's earlier book Faust in Copenhagen, which also portrays the way scientists think and work together, in that case in producing the ensemble production we know as quantum mechanics.

State of Wonder is a sort-of estrogen-infused version of Heart of Darkness. A major drug company sends Dr. Marina Singh deep into the Amazon rainforest to track down a rogue doctor working to develop a a blockbuster drug that will end menopause and enable women of any age to get pregnant, something that is common in the remote Amazonian tribe that the doctor is living with. Dr. Singh is the second person the drug company has sent down there and part of her mission is to find out more about the circumstances of the death of the doctor that came before her.

The writing is consistently enthralling, especially the descriptions of the rainforest that range from the insects to the snakes to the wonderous and unique ecosystems that are at the heart of the mystery of permanent child bearing.

At its best, the plot is also very good -- and I will not spoil the ending but suffice it to say that the last third or so of the novel was particularly exciting.

The characters are much less consistent -- the rogue doctor, Dr. Swenson, is an outstanding portrayal of a larger-than-live figure who feels as tangibly alive and real as any character in a recent novel. But a number of the other characters are more flat backdrops, which would not be a major issue if they did not occupy so much space in the book -- including an unnecessary third of the book spent in a Brazilian city before Dr. Singh heads out into the rainforest.

Overall, very good and well worth reading.

This short novella is a beautifully wrought miniature of Nikola Tesla. It begins with his birth, ends with his death, and roughly covers everything major in between -- although oddly fictionalizes the name of the main character calling him "Gregor", even though the other characters have their real names (e.g., Edison and Westinghouse) and it has an almost non fiction level of accuracy in depicting Tesla's life.

The narrative conveys both the wonder of invention and Tesla's madness, as well as the reasons that he is increasingly unable to translate his ideas into tangible output. This is all told in a series of very short chapters, many of them vignettes, but ones that add up together to something approaching a novel -- if not in length.

Although not nearly as interesting and creative as Samantha Hunt's Tesla novel (The Invention of Everything Else), it is thought-provoking and a comprehensive depiction of Tesla's life and contributions.

Sharon McGrayne is a very good and engaging writer. She has an interesting story to tell about the last 250 years of Bayesian thinking, how the theory has developed, and its many applications including how to price insurance, how to aim artillery, how to break the Enigma code, who wrote The Federalist Papers, how to find Russian nuclear subs, how to estimate the probability of a shuttle disaster, when to do various cancer screenings, whether cigarette smoking is harmful, etc. She also has a great set of characters, a parade of statisticians who are more colorful than I could have imagined, from the pioneers of Bayes, Price and Laplace to most recent statisticians like Cornfield, Tukey and Mosteller.

But, the book is deeply flawed and disappointing because it does so little to actually explain Bayes Theorem, how it was applied, how it led to different confusions than frequentism, and how the two have recently been theoretically synthesized. Most of this is not very complicated, one knows a decent amount already, but it would be more interesting to understand hot it was applied. Instead, the book concentrates much more on personality and the more surface descriptions rather than dwelling deeper and working out at least a few examples in more detail, both more of the theory from first principals but also better understanding what data and calculations various of her protagonists were using. Absent that, the book is often literally superficial.

Still, the book has a lot of upside -- but given that there is not exactly a huge selection of books covering this ground (unlike, say, quantum mechanics) to have this as nearly the sole choice is disappointing.

This novel grew on me more and more as I read it. But still seemed to fall short. It tells the story of the arrival and departure of the plague from a French-Algerian town in the 1940s, largely told through the eyes of a local doctor. It is nicely structured, beginning with the ominous signs of dead rats and ending with the return of first rats, then cats, and then dogs marking the departure of the plague. It is all observed in great, with a somewhat less than fully omniscient narrator, who focuses on the impact the plague has on social relations and social order.

The observation is often very detached, the engagement with the characters distant and fleeting, which at times makes it more difficult to connect with the book.

The Plague is commonly described as an allegory for the Nazi occupation in World War II, but I don't see much beyond some obvious superficial analogies.