Reviews
Richard Schickel, Film on Paper: The Inner Life of MoviesThis is the latest offering from Richard Schickel, a renowned film critic who probably knows more -- and writes with greater incision -- about the history of film than any contemporary reviewer.
John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin
John McCabe's insightful biography of Charlie Chaplin is a scholarly work, which will easily engage both young and old. McCabe (1920-2005) is best known for his biographies.
A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir
This new edition of Papa Hemingway from Da Capo Press brings A.E. Hotchner's famous memoir back into print for the first time in nearly a decade.
Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist
Flora Samuel, an architect and lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture, has written widely on the subject of Le Corbusier. In Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist, she unearths certain aspects of his work that other researchers have ignored or discounted.
Hans C. Ohanian, Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius
While a patent clerk in 1905, Einstein published a handful of seminal physics papers which received wide critical acclaim. These papers, notes Ohanian, contained several mistakes.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakepeare
Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World is an enlightening biographical study of not only William Shakespeare, but also of England in the late 1500s.
Hollis Alpert, Fellini: A Life
Perhaps once in a generation, an artist comes along to permanently alter the landscape of his medium. In Fellini: A Life, Hollis Alpert guides the reader through the tumultuous life of this fascinating Italian master.
Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing MachinesWithout a doubt, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing were two of the most compelling figures in the history of mathematics, logic and philosophy. Gödel's revolutionary “incompleteness theorems” and Turing's work with artificial intelligence have changed the world.
John Rigden, Einstein 1905: The Standard of GreatnessEinstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness, is a detailed look into the five papers written by Einstein in 1905 - known as his Annus Mirabilis, the extraordinary year - that truly separated him from other physicists of his time and beyond.
Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt GodelIncompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein tells the story of Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians and logicians of modern times.
Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of GeniusEinstein and Oppenheimer examines the lives of two of the 20th century's most consequential physicists.
Ingo F. Walther, Picasso
This brief biography, published as part of Taschen’s short and affordable series on notable artists, provides a nice introduction to the life and work of Pablo Picasso.
Gille Néret, DalíThis brief and colorful volume offers a biographical and thematic survey of the remarkably complex and controversial work of the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí.
Helen Vendler, Our Secret DisciplineHelen Vendler is one of the most important literary critics in recent decades. This latest offering, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, is the sort of book that one might read out of a passing interest in William Butler Yeats.
Jean-Louis Cohen, Le CorbusierCharles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris -- better known as Le Corbusier, the name he adopted in 1920 -- was among the most significant architects and urban planners of the 20th century, and his career was marked by an astonishing productivity and self-promoted celebrity.
Burton Feldman, 112 Mercer StreetDuring the winter of 1943-44, as much of the supposedly civilized world tore itself limb from limb, four of the most brilliant thinkers of the century gathered in a small colonial-style house in Princeton, New Jersey.
Frank Tallis,Hidden Minds: The History of the UnconsciousHaving exposed the power of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud was hardly modest in assessing his own achievement. Like Copernicus and Darwin, he argued, his theories had delivered the “third and most wounding blow” to the “naïve self-love” that characterized human culture.
David R. Contosta,Rebel Giants:This book offers a timely examination of the lives of two men who transformed their world -- and ours -- in ways that are difficult to adequately summarizein a few hundred pages.
Nicolle Rosen, Mrs. Freud: A Novel.Despite the recent biography of Martha Freud by Katja Behling, and the numerous books about her husband, Sigmund Freud, little has been written about how Mrs. Freud (1861-1951) may have felt about her life with the founder of psychoanalysis.
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the CosmosPhysicist Brian Greene, a well-known string theorist, does his best to explain complex and abstract theoretical physics to the average layperson, which, no doubt, is a monumental feat.
Harald Fritzsch, The Curvature of Spacetime: Newton, Einstein and GravitationNewton, Einstein and Gravitation - In the late 1970s, Steve Allen hosted a show on PBS called “A Meeting of Minds.” Its format was a talk show bringing together renowned historical personalities, portrayed by actors.
Victor J. Stenger, GOD:The Failed HypothesisThe late, great Stephen J. Gould posited that science and religion can be described as properly having "non-overlapping magisteria" - in other words, that religion doesn't describe the processes of the natural world and science has nothing to say about morality.
Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as StageBill Bryson’s concise biography of William Shakespeare is brilliantly written, humorously insightful, and entirely delightful. The prose is a well-crafted and playful presentation of the dozen odd facts known about Shakespeare and many of the suppositions, inferences, and wild speculations about the man and his work.
David C. Cassidy, Einstein and Our World- Einstein and Our World is in many ways like an engaging, introductory school course – so effectively conveyed that it might inspire a lifelong passion for the subject. The “instructor” in this case is David C. Cassidy, a professor of natural sciences at Hofstra University, and the former associate editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
Alex Orenstein, W.V. QuineWillard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), was one of the greatest analytic philosophers and logicians of the 20th century whose body of work fits into a long history of philosophical treatments of metaphysics, epistemology and language, especially within the empiricist tradition, which remains profoundly influential to this day.
Tamas Pataki, Against ReligionThe enduring power of religious belief in the 21st century would come as something of a surprise to Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and the other long-departed social theorists whose influence lurks in the background of Tamas Pataki’s provocative essays Against Religion.
Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico FelliniEverything you ever wanted to know about Federico Fellini’s film history is in Peter Bondanella’s exhaustive and scholarly treatment of the director’s early influences.
Kristine Larsen, Stephen Hawking: A BiographyKristine Larsen begins her biography of Stephen Hawking with a central question: how has a theoretical physicist known for "esoteric mathematics" and "the secret language of general relativity" become a cultural icon and the most recognizable scientist in the world?
Jeff Kanipe, The Cosmic ConnectionIn "The Cosmic Connection," Jeff Kanipe tackles the Earth's place in the universe, and how other denizens and aspects of the cosmos have contributed to the development of life here. Yet, they may also have led to mass extinctions in the past and may yet again in the future. The cosmos giveth and the cosmos taketh away, it seems.
Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's PhilosophyAlthough he died nearly 400 years ago, William Shakespeare's legacy continues to resonate today. His works, which include 37 plays, five poems and 154 sonnets, strike a chord with modern audiences not only because...
Marina Picasso, Picasso, My GrandfatherThis memoir -- the first from a Picasso progeny -- recounts the cumulative familial wreckage produced by Pablo Picasso, as told by his granddaughter, Marina.
David Bevington, How To Read A Shakespeare PlayHow to Read a Shakespeare Play is part of a small series of "How To" books released by Blackwell Publishing and designed to aid college-level students with their literature studies. Despite the somewhat officious title, this small volume by David Bevington strays....
David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous EquationThis is a book about a mathematical formula that nearly everyone -- even those who are science-phobic -- can recite, but almost no one can actually explain with the slightest degree of coherence.
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only NumbersWhen the great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos died in 1996 at the age of 83, he left behind a staggering body of work. With nearly 1500 academic articles to his credit -- by far the most extensive publishing record of any mathematician in history -- Erdos collaborated with 485 co-authors during his long career.
Jack Lynch, Becoming ShakespeareUnlike most biographies, this one begins not with the birth, but with the death of its subject. Not much is known about William Shakespeare's life, but much has come to be known about the playwright since his death in 1616. This growth in the reputation of the Bard (as he became known ) is a fascinating story in its own right.
Kevin J. Hayes, Charlie Chaplin InterviewsHis autobiography, filled with rank name-dropping, is almost unreadable. The 1992 biopic, despite a fine performance by Robert Downey, Jr., is an embarrassment. And not everyone wants to plow through a 750-page biography just to find out what made the Little Tramp tick. Luckily, there is now a better way to know Charlie Chaplin.
Timothy A. Kelly, Healing the Broken MindJoining the chorus of voices in the health care debate, an issue which has continued to dominate the American conversation, is Timothy A. Kelly with Healing the Broken Mind.
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A LifeWhat do a rogue elephant, a wild boar, and a shaven porcupine have in common? They all reflect facets of Karl Marx’s personality as described by British journalist Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life,” an entertaining biography of a man whose life story does not immediately appear to have had the potential for a lot of laughs.
David Thomson, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho is a foray into the black-and-white imagination of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous film. While it is an examination of the movie and its impact on contemporary cinema, the book's ultimate strength lies in little details that Thomson...
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our FutureWritten by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America addresses the disconnect between the country's brightest minds and the political process that has so much power over funding and applications for new research.
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash Mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. was so confident of his own genius that in 1948, at the age of 20, he challenged Albert Einstein in his Princeton office about amending the physicist’s quantum theory. Nash was a man obsessed with originality and regularly sought answers to unsolved math problems that no other theorist would touch.
Scott Donaldson, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and DaysIn Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, Scott Donaldson draws on his own remarkable writings, crafted over the last four decades, to form a collection of essays -- part biographical, part critical -- about two of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century.
David Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories Here is a quote to consider: "[Karl Marx's] real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, of the conditions under which it could win its freedom."
Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A LifeMozart. The name conjures up various images: a child prodigy playing blindfolded on the keyboard; a moody composer writing music on a billiard table; a man-child throwing his head back in high-pitch giggles. Probably thanks to the unforgettable, Academy Award winning film Amadeus, these are the images that flash through our minds.
