History
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Eleanor Roosevelt: A Guide to Inner Strength
‘Do what you feel in your heart to. be right – for you’ll be critisised anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.‘― Eleanor Roosevelt
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The Importance of Universal Human Rights at Home
‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin ? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighbourhood he lives in, the school or college he attends, the factory, farm,…
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Ain’t I a woman ?
‘That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman ? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and…
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Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics, Ruth Lewin Sime (ISBN 978-0-520-20860-5, University of California Press)
This is the second biography of Lise Meitner I read. After reading the biography by Patricia Rife I was at first hesitant to also go and read this book by Ruth Lewin Sime. But after finishing the book I have to say it was well worth every minute. Where the biography of Patricia Rife focused…
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Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Patricia Rife (ISBN 978-0817637323, Birkhäuser)
A very nice biography about one of the ‘forgotten’ women of science. I came across a reference to this book somewhere and decided to read it as part of my ‘atomic’ theme. It also fits nicely into a series of books I am reading about women scientists. I had read the excellent ‘The making of…
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Vienna ahead of the curve
‘By the end of the century, Vienna had given birth to Viktor Adler’s socialism and Theodor Herzl’s Zionism. It was the home Sigmund Freud loved to hate and the political base for Karl Lueger, the city’s longtime mayor, whose heady mix of pupulism and anti-Semitism drew the rapt attention of the young Adolf Hitler. If…
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Turning point. The bomb and the Cold War
I recently was tipped about this Netflix series about the atomic bomb and the Cold War so I decided to give it a try. It fitted with much of my recent reading about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes and Leslie Groves. The series has 9 episodes of roughly 70…
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Beginnings of war
‘Since wars begin in the minds of men it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.‘― Clement Attlee & Archibald MacLeish
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The Story of Numbers, John McLeish (ISBN 978-0-449-90938-6, Fawcett Columbine)
The Story of Numbers explores the history of mathematics to trace the rise of various number systems in cultures from Mesopotamia to the modern Computer Era. It is not a traditional history of mathematics or a history of mathematicians. Instead it focuses on the different number systems and calculation methods that evolved in time in…
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