Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A collection of pieces by the noted New Yorker science writer Jeremy Bernstein, this book includes pieces from the New Yorker as well as many others published in smaller journals and two new pieces. Among the great scientists discussed are Alan Turing, Primo Levi and Edwin Land.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Always articulate and interesting, Bernstein ranks among the very best of popular science essayists. This anthology of 16 of his finest recent essays is a true collection --i.e., instead of a smattering of unrelated writings, haphazardly assembled, this book explores several related themes and, by doing so, reveals fundamental linkages between the lives and works of several key 20th-century scientists. Among them, readers meet, in very personal ways, Albert Eintein, Niels Bohr, Alan Turing, Erwin Schrodinger, and Stephen Hawking. They also meet some significant but lesser-known figures, like Edwin Land, Tom Lehrer, Sophia Kovalevsky, and, in an extremely moving work, the Italian chemist Primo Levi, who was a prisoner at Auschwitz. While most of the essays have been previously published, one of the new works, the concluding essay entitled ``Science Education for Non-Scientists,'' is an important addition in that it convincingly outlines why science literacy is important. Recommended for popular science collections.-- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs., Bozeman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This is the third collection from physicist Bernstein, whose New Yorker column, ``The Annals of Science,'' begun in the 1960s, popularized literary profiles of scientists. His first collection, Experiencing Science , published in 1978, contains what are arguably his best pieces, but the 13 profiles and meditations here, drawn from the last five years, offer certain late-career pleasures. The ``cranks'' of the title refers to Bernstein's personal test for distinguishing the insight of genius from the demands of eccentricity, elucidated in ``How Can We Be Sure That Albert Einstein Was Not a Crank?'' Among pieces on Alan Turing, Primo Levi and James Watson, ``Feet of Clay,'' the profile of Erwin Schrodinger, creator of wave mechanics, demonstrates the Bernstein approach at its best: an arcane theory and a diffident man caught in difficult times--all drawn with lucidity, humanity and discreet intelligence. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Bernstein's writing is nonmathematical and should be easily understood by college undergraduates with a minimal science background. His 16 essays cover the lives and works of such well-known scientists as Albert Einstein, Ernst Mach, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schr"odinger, Alan Turing, Edwin H. Land, Primo Levi, and others, ending with humorist/mathematics professor Tom Lehrer; the last two essays cover intelligence testing and science education for the nonscientist. Bernstein includes a short autobiography in the introduction, and his essays deal with a very wide spectrum of views on science and the scientist as researcher, writer, and educator, including a very personal view of the scientist. The author's voice is obvious in all essays and there is a strong "I've been there and here's what I saw" flavor to even the most esoteric subject, although the essays are concerned primarily with the lives and works of scientists other than Bernstein. There is a great deal in this volume that is not usually covered in textbooks; it should constitute a very useful background for both science majors and nonscience students. General; undergraduate; graduate. P. R. Douville; emeritus, Central Connecticut State University

Kirkus Book Review

For a change, not just a miscellany of previously published pieces but essays--including two originals--with a couple of underlying themes. Generally, these pieces concern my-life-and-thoughts-about- writing, as well as insights into particular writers, editors, and scientists whom Bernstein (The Life It Brings, 1987, etc.) has known or studied extensively. This preeminent profiler of scientists for The New Yorker begins with a tribute to William Shawn, who meticulously dissected Bernstein's first 60-page piece. In other essays, Bernstein conveys what it is, in style and substance, that enables one to distinguish geniuses from cranks. There are admiring essays on Ernst (speed of sound) Mach, who could never be convinced of the reality of atoms; of Einstein, who could never accept quantum theory; and of Hawking, who sneers at ``Theories of Everything.'' Finally, Bernstein makes some startling comments on science biographies and science writing. He says that he finds confessional biographies excessive--from Watson to Luria to Turing to Feynman. At the same time, he finds Einstein's letters to his lover/first-wife absorbing and revealing, and he is quite willing to discuss Schrödinger's well-known womanizing. Bernstein also says that he truly believes (at least in his own case) that you have to be a scientist to write about science--and that you must keep working at both vocations. Thus, he rejects the later writing of Primo Levi after Levi retired from chemistry. One wonders if Bernstein doesn't suffer the opposite of Harold Bloom's ``anxiety of influence'': Far from feeling anxiety, he wants constant dipping into the scientific waters of mentors and peers. For all one may carp with the opinions and self-righteousness, there's no denying that Bernstein writes well and sometimes even in a light vein. So readers will be rewarded to learn what happened to Tom Lehrer as well as to hear about the great and the tragic.