Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick (Vintage, $14).
“There are two kinds of geniuses, the `ordinary’ and the `magicians,’ mathematician Mark Krac once wrote. “An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. . . . Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.”
Gleick’s book comes close to capturing Feynman’s genius, in its amusing and often astonishing portrait of his unique, eccentric mind and personality.
Even as Feynman was doing key work on the Los Alamos project, he taught himself how to pick locks and crack safes. He won a 1965 Nobel Prize for describing the behavior of elementary particles in quantum electrodynamics, and he taught himself to sustain the most complicated two-handed rhythms on the bongo drums.
And he was a great teacher, as he demonstrated before the world when he cut through the obfuscations of NASA to solve the mystery of the Challenger disaster by dropping a chunk of O-ring into a glass of ice water, where it lost its elasticity.
Private Pleasures, by Lawrence Sanders (Berkley, $5.99).
The latest Sanders, an original paperback, is a “Grand Hotel” with a dysfunctional cast of grifters, ex-hookers, scientists, mismatched husbands and wives and two kids who plan to run away from home.
The book turns on the work of two unhappily married scientists. One is developing a fragrance called Cuddle, which makes the wearers, well, cuddly-in love with the world and eager to share their innermost feelings. The other is developing for the government a substance called ZAP, which turns men into monstrous aggressors. The characters take turns as narrators, but the hand of the puppet master is always there, tweaking their idiocies and making the reader laugh.
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, by Richard Slotkin (HarperPerennial, $20).
Like the Gleick book, this was a National Book Award nominee for nonfiction, but quite a different story. It’s not to be confused, either, with the spate of TV documentaries on the “real West.”
Instead, Slotkin-in the last piece of a trilogy-delineates the frontier myth: a tale of superior (white) men confronting “savages” and securing their own regeneration and often that of the nation through violence. He also shows how that myth has affected, infected and afflicted American foreign policy from the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan and also shaped popular thinking through movies and books.
It is a not a short book (660 pages of text, 190 of notes and index), but Slotkin writes in a swift, compelling style that will reward western fans and foes alike.
Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbage: What Our Garbage Tells Us About Ourselves, by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy (HarperPerennial, $23).
“What a delightful book! And, of all things, it’s about garbage, the waste of life,” reviewer Patrick T. Reardon wrote in the Tribune last year. “Who would have thought that reading about that smelly, dirty, slimy, broken, rotten, stained, poisonous, gritty, bulky junk that we toss out every day could be so interesting and so much fun? Yet William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s book `Rubbish!’ transforms this thing disdained by everyone into a fascinating subject filled with insights about how we live.”
For many years, Rathje and his students at the University of Arizona have been sifting and sorting through almost a quarter of a million pounds of trash as part of the Garbage Project. Conceived by Rathje in 1971, the Garbage Project intended to apply the principles of real archeology to our modern “artifacts.”
What we know of past civilizations, we know through the science of archeology, and “to an archeologist, ancient garbage pits or garbage mounds . . . are always among the happiest of finds, for they contain in concentrated form the artifacts and comestibles and remnants of behavior of the people who used them,” Rathje and Murphy wrote. Now, after two decades, Rathje explodes several garbage myths and defuses much of the rhetoric surrounding the garbage problem as he and Murphy, the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, reveal the findings of the Garbage Project.
“Rathje and Murphy have brought some sense and, just as important, some well-documented facts to the overheated debate about what we should do with our garbage; for they see garbage not as useless junk but as important evidence about the lives of the people who threw it away,” Reardon wrote.
Cleese Encounters, by Jonathan Margolis (St. Martin’s Press, $12.95).
John Cleese “should . . . be rather pleased with biographer Jonathan Margolis’ `Cleese Encounters,’ for it does a fine job of explaining to fans the creative methods behind the `Python’ and `Fawlty Towers’ madness,” reviewer Ronald L. Smith wrote in the Tribune last year. “Margolis, who calls himself `an unreconstructed admirer’ of Cleese, has a fan’s appreciation for the man’s work and peppers the book with punchy trivia.”
While Cleese himself “with utmost politeness declined to cooperate” with him, Margolis had almost unlimited access to the comedian’s friends and ex-wives as well as virtually every interview Cleese has done. The resulting book leans toward intellectual topics-how a properly raised, mother-dominated, introspective young man arrived at his fierce form of humor, how anger forced him to pursue peace and happiness at an almost manic pace and how experiments with psychoanalysis affected him.
Theories on comedy, anger, depression, creativity and death predominate. Even so, “students of comedy and discriminating fans of John Cleese will find this book fun, and, even when deadly serious, quite lively,” Smith wrote.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, by Daniel Boorstin (Vintage, $16).
“He who loses his sight loses his view of the universe,” Leonardo da Vinci proclaimed. “Do you not see that the eye encompasses the beauty of the whole world?”
“That the human eye lies at the nub of creation is a refrain that runs throughout `The Creators,’ conceived as the companion book to Daniel Boorstin’s tale of man’s `pursuit of knowledge,’ `The Discoverers,’ reviewer Harrison E. Salisbury wrote in the Tribune last year. Here, Boorstin traces the triumphs of man’s imagination, from Sanskrit texts and ancient Vedic hymns to Picasso and the silver screen.
Reviewing the whole “History of Heroes of the Imagination” is no easy task-not when you take the entire world as your workplace and attempt to follow all the threads that issue. “Daniel Boorstin has recognized the speed with which the human eye must move if it is to encompass all the wisdom of the world,” Salisbury wrote. “And in `The Creators’ he has . . . accomplished his grandiose task with sklll and eloquence.”
