Biographies books
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- The Beat of a Different Drum: Life and Science of Richard P. Feynman
- The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd
- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer¶
Author: Bird, Kai; Sherwin, Martin J.
Published Date: 2009-01-01
Pages: 736.0
ISBN: 9781843547051
Summary: American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.
He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force's plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets.
American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer's life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is based on thousands of records and letters gathered from archives in America and abroad, on massive FBI files and on close to a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer's friends, relatives and colleagues.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City's Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world's most accomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world's most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at mid-century, a new and compelling portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly connected to its major events—the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and essential to our understanding of our recent past—and of our choices for the future.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Any Fool Can be a Pig Farmer¶
Author: Robertson, James Irvine
Published Date: 1989-04-14
Pages: 155.0
ISBN: 9780852361962
Summary: This, the first of James Robertson’s sagas about agriculture and country life, demonstrates that the young and inexperienced Robertson was even more prone to disaster than the older and still inexperienced Robertson. His pigs bit him, gave him lice, crawled up to his bed and indicated that man is not necessarily the dominant species. How do you communicate the facts of life to an innocent young boar? Persuade a sow not to eat her young? Survive an investigation by the Inland Revenue? Stay out of jail when your newly insured barn goes up in smoke? Any Fool Can be a Pig Farmer shows the other side of the rural idyll. It is painful, real and very funny.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Calves in the Classroom¶
Author: Terry, John; Brewis, Henry
Published Date: 1987-10-01
Pages: 192.0
ISBN: 9780852361658
Summary: This is one of three books charting the progress of a Warwickshire school farm, from its beginning as a wasteland to its success as a smallholding, including a flock of prize-winning sheep.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Don't You Have Time to Think?¶
Author: Feynman, Richard P.
Published Date: 2006-03-02
Pages: 512.0
ISBN: 9780141021133
Summary: Edited and with additional commentary by Michelle Feynman.
Finding out about someone by reading their correspondence is a fundamentally different thing than reading their biography. Letters offer both more intimacy with the subject and at the same time a crucial distance--the exact distance the letter-writer intended from the people to whom he was writing. In Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, Michelle Feynman collects her famous father's letters to reveal a warm, honest man with high expectations for himself, his loved ones, and the human race. Long before Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize, he was a smart, skinny graduate student at Princeton, writing letters to his mother and relating the mundane details of college life. "Dear Mom.... The raincoat came O.K. It is very nice," he writes. By the time he finished his Ph.D., Feynman had fallen for Arline Greenbaum, who had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Their tragically short marriage is set in letters against Feynman's first job--working on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Even while working on top secret physics, Feynman was an enthusiastic correspondent, jumping eagerly at the chance to encourage a young scientist, correct a public misperception, or tell a goofy joke to his family. Self-effacing, charmingly down to earth, and occasionally cranky, these letters cover Feynman's entire career, although in the fits and starts one would expect from a collection such as this. His own words to students, spouses, daughters, and fellow scientists reveal Feynman's brilliance far more effectively than any biographical lens ever could. --Therese Littleton
Also published under the title Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Letters of Richard P. Feynman.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Ducks in Detention¶
Author: Terry, John; Brewis, Henry
Published Date: 1990-06-15
Pages: 200.0
ISBN: 9780852362082
Summary: This is one of three books charting the progress of a Warwickshire school farm, from its beginning as a wasteland to its success as a smallholding, including a flock of prize-winning sheep.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics¶
Author: Gleick, James
Published Date: 1994-04-02
Pages: 560.0
ISBN: 9780349105321
Summary: Genius is a brilliant interweaving of Richard Feynman's colourful life and a detailed and accessible account of his theories and experiments - nearly half a century of which amount to no less than the story of modern physics itself.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Pigs in the Playground¶
Author: Terry, John; Brewis, Henry
Published Date: 1986-03-13
Pages: 208.0
ISBN: 9780852361580
Summary: This is one of three books charting the progress of a Warwickshire school farm, from its beginning as a wasteland to its success as a smallholding, including a flock of prize-winning sheep.
Rating: ★★★★☆
The Beat of a Different Drum: Life and Science of Richard P. Feynman¶
Author: Mehra, Jagdish
Published Date: 1996-05-01
Pages: 662.0
ISBN: 9780198518877
Summary: This definitive book deals with the life & scientific work of arguably the greatest American-born theoretical physicist of the 20th century. He was a great teacher, a born showman, bongo drummer, buffoon & iconoclast; a scientific magician capable of transcendental leaps of the imagination. During his career he was drawn into research on the atomic bomb before working out his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics & quantum electro-dynamics. Subsequently he developed the diagrammatic technique, as a result of which Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics & statistical mechanics. From 1950 he was based at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the superfluidity of liquid helium, the theory of polarons, the theory of weak interactions, the quantum theory of gravitation, partons, quark jets & the limits of computation. He'd a unified view of physics & nature. He took the whole of nature as the arena of his science & imagination. Jagdish Mehra personally knew Feynman for 30 years. In 1980 Feynman suggested he might do what he had already done for Heisenberg, Pauli & Dirac, that is write a definitive account of his life, science & personality. Mehra instantly agreed & subsequently spent several weeks talking to him. After Feynman's death Mehra interviewed almost 80 people who'd known him & aspects of his work. This book draws on this unique material & on Feynman's remarkable writings. It covers his childhood, his three marriages, his extraordinary range of interests. But most important, it deals with his scientific work in far greater detail than in any other biographical work. What has emerged is an authoritative account of Feynman's life & achievements.
Rating: ★★★★☆
The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd¶
Author: Rebanks, James; Shepherd, Herdwick
Published Date: 2015-11-05
Pages: 176.0
ISBN: 9781846148903
Summary: I am the luckiest man alive, because I get to live and work in the most beautiful place on earth: Matterdale in the English Lake District. When I was a child we didn't really go anywhere, except a week in the Isle of Man when I was about ten years old, and I never left Britain until I was twenty. Even now, years later, the best bit of any travelling is coming home. Bringing us into the world of shepherd's baking competitions, sheep shows and moments out on the fell watching the sheep run away home, James Rebanks interweaves thoughts and reflections on the art of shepherding with his photographs of the valley, people and animals that make up the daily life of the fells. A life lived by the three hundred surviving fell farming families, this is a book of photos and words filled with reverence and love.
Rating: ★★★★☆
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius¶
Author: Farmelo, Graham
Published Date: 2009-01-22
Pages: 560.0
ISBN: 9780571222780
Summary: 'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn
The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.
Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.
The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.
'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph
Rating: ★★★☆☆