John A. Wheeler is not only of the world's leading physicists but he is a great teacher. Besides writing an excellent popular introduction to Relativity theory "Gravity And Spacetime" he is co-writer of the most popular academic work on General Relativity "Gravitation" and also of a superb textbook introducing undergraduates to Special Relativity "Spacetime Physics". Both Professor's Wheeler popular works and text books are clear, user friendly expositions of Relativity Theory. So it was with great anticipation that I started Wheeler's collections of essays "At Home In The Universe".

Unfortunately many of the essays are directed at the professional scientist and are beyond the level of even the well read amateur. Reading some of Professor Wheeler's discussions of the philosophy of science is like being thrown into a discussion being conducted by people who have known each other for a very long time and have developed a special language. For instance, "With a slight rewording of Bohr's formulation, we say, 'The use of certain concepts in the description of nature automatically excludes the use of other concepts, which however, in another connection are equally necessary for the description of the phenomenon.'"

There are some gems in this book, though. John A. Wheeler seems to have personally known every great scientist of the Twentieth Century: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Andrei Sakharov, Kurt Godel, John von Neumann, Steven Weinberg. His comments on them and their work are invaluable.

Wheeler also has some interesting comments on the risks of a nuclear energy. One does not need to accept his optimistic viewpoint in order to appreciate his insight.

"At Home In The Universe" is really two books: one for the professional scientist and another for the general public. If the volume was separated, we would have two excellent books instead of a single disappointing one.

John Archibald Wheeler is one of the landmark physicists of the 20th century. He has served as mentor to Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett (among others). He made significant contributions on the production of the A-bomb in WWII and also headed up the US efforts to make the H-bomb post WWII. He is, in a word, one of the most under-rated scientists of the current epoch.

In the present book, he spends most of his pages paying homage to people who dedicated their lives to science over the centuries. Such venerable names as Nicolaus Copernicus, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Hideki Yukawa, Maria Sklodowska Curie, Hermann Weyl and others form the objects of Wheeler's praise. Much of the book is made up of snippets of terse speeches which Wheeler has made at various symposiums and celebrations during his lengthy sojourn at Princeton. For example, there is a brief poem which he wrote for Joseph Henry which is included, as well as an oration on the "colleagueship at Princeton" which he delivered in 1966.

Interspersed throughout the book are essays which Wheeler has written on quantum mechanics, black holes, cosmology & the like. These are not the easiest pieces to read; I would suggest that readers browse through some preliminary books on QM before attempting to read Wheeler ("Taking The Quantum Leap" by Fred Alan Wolf might be a good place to start). The essays are well written & Wheeler uses some helpful analogies, but the going is still pretty rough. One of Wheeler's quotes which I really like (not from this book, though) is "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." One is sure to find many-a-strange scientific phenomenom in this book.

This book lacks a central, cohesive theme & the order in which it was put together does not follow any specific chronology or format. However, I don't think this takes away from the book's superb picture of what one of the premiere scientists of the 20th century spends his days thinking about. There are several passages in which he compares and contrasts science with philosophy as well as with the pragmatism of everyday existence. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in John Archibald Wheeler, physics, or the scientific community of Princeton university. Make yourself at home....

This is a rewarding book. The author has researched his subject thoroughly, and he brings some interesting analysis to it. There are, however, a few problems.
First, the author argues that Campbell was a Southern "moderate." Judged by the likes of his fellow-Alabamian, the "fire-eating" William Lowndes Yancey, he was. He believed that slavery was a flawed institution, but he vehemently defended both its constitutionality and its morality. (He was after all a member of the Supreme Court majority that decided the infamously pro-slavery Dred Scott case in 1857). He told his fellow-Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis that he freed all of his slaves "some years" before the beginning of the Civil War, but, as the author points out, the assertion was false--whether intentionally or inadvertently it is unclear. Campbell expressed rather tepid opposition to secession in 1861, arguing that Lincoln's election, in itself, was insufficient cause for the separation. But he stoutly defended the constitutional right of the South to go its own way. And when, in the spring of 1861, he attempted to find an alternative to secession, he argued that the Constitution should be amended to protect slavery in perpetuity, and that this amendment itself should be made unamendable. Was this moderation?
The author speaks often and admiringly of Campbell's great intelligence, but facts dropped here and there raise questions. Attending Lincoln's first inauguration, Campbell proclaimed the President "a conceited man" and condemned his address as "a stump speech" totally wanting in "dignity and decorum." And in a letter to Jefferson Davis he expressed the opinion that Lincoln was "light, inconstant, variable." Was Campbell intelligent? Certainly. But did he have good judgment?
It would have been interesting if the author had compared Campbell's decision to resign from the Supreme Court in 1861 to the decisions of John Catron and James Wayne to stay on the Court. All three were pro-slavery justices from states that seceded (Catron from Tennessee and Wayne from Georgia). But Campbell's loyalty was to Alabama, Catron's and Wayne's to the United States. The author ignores the decisions of Catron and Wayne, which would have added an interesting contrast to Campbell's.
The author's writing is uneven. In places, it is engaging and persuasive. In others, it is murky. In yet others it betrays a pro-Campbell bias that tends to undermine the principal arguments of the book. And, since so much of the book concerns legal issues, the author's misunderstanding of some basic legal procedures is unfortunate (a trial court decision is not reviewed by "filing suit" in the Supreme Court but by "appealing" from the judgment in the original suit.) Finally, someone (the author himself or a copy editor) should have checked the text more carefully. It is marred by more than an acceptable number of errors, some typographical, others more substantial.
Notwithstanding this criticism, I found this a useful book. It taught me a lot about Campbell, who was an important historical figure. Anyone who is interested in learning more about the tragic sequence of events that led up to the beginning of the Civil War can read it with profit.

John Archibald Campbell's life and political philosophy illustrate the difficulties that Southern moderates faced in developing and implementing a solution to the problems of slavery and secession. Campbell opposed both slavery and secession. Campbell's legal gifts eventually led him to practice before the United States Supreme Court and subsequently to an appointment to the Supreme Court itself. During his service on the Supreme Court Campbell opposed the Filibusterers in the New Orleans region, wrote a concurring opinion in the Dred Scot case, and rejected nullification by the courts of Wisconsin. As a moderate Campbell was vilified by both Southern fire-eaters and Abolitionist radicals. Campbell served eight years (1853-1861) on the Supreme Court before resigning to become an assistant secretary in the Confederate War Department. After the war he practiced law in New Orleans where he eventually became the lead attorney in the Slaughterhouse Case. His views in this case prepared the way for the broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Twentieth Century. This book gives a very solid story of the life and labors of an important lawyer of the 19th Century. This political biography is the first full life of John Archibald Campbell. It will be of great use to students of the Supreme Court, American history, and legal scholars as well as those who enjoy good biography. It belongs in most libraries.

The story of Vancouver's voyage to the Pacific North West is one of much hardship, persistance and determination. John Naish tells the story of the voyage by cross referencing the journals and diaries of four of the key players in this expedition. Taken individualy the journals are a great read themselves but when used to collaborate or just to fill in blanks it results in a very pleasant read. It takes the reader into the world of 1791-1795 in such a way that we can forget, briefly, what we have today and imagine the world during the times of the French Revolution and the emergence of America as a nation.

I purchased my copy used (20$) and (after my initial delight at the bargain) was disappointed. I had hoped for a more technical intermediate-level expansion of Wheeler's intriguing but vague "Journey into Gravity and Spacetime." This book is instead largely a hodge-podge of specialty articles of interest only to advanced professionals in the field. Unless you have money to burn, invest it in another text, like "Gravitation," by Thorne, Wheeler, etc., which isn't great but is useful.

This book tought me a lot about the physics of gravitation and inerti

J. Arch Getty's Origins of the Great Purges is a work that makes important and original points about the era of Soviet terror. It is the author's means of arriving at such points, and the many inauspicious conclusions that often follow from them, that is such a source of stupefaction. The reader is left wishing Getty had stuck with his most important idea and developed it further: that the terror was truly, as common sense might lead any Soviet scholar to hypothesize, a monster of many heads and many tails. This single point, if argued cogently, would have taken much of the force out of earlier writings of this period, which led to the author's own questions of it. Those writings depict a totalitarian state in which Stalin's words were heeded without question practically from the moment they left his mouth. It just wasn't so, according to Getty. Many Politburo members and upper level henchmen such as Ordzhonikidze, Yezhov, and Yagoda, acted according to their own resolve. Furthermore, the rapid rate of industrialization, and indeed the rate of socialization, created a confused and inefficient state of affairs at all levels. Following the author's lead, we are meant to question how any one man could have designed the Purges in light of such chaotic conditions.

There is more in this vein, such as what is suggested by the high rate of electoral turnover of local Party committees; Stalin and his retinue would have had very little or no impact in deciding the outcome of votes. Also convincing is the author's argument that the purging of Party members was merely a symptom of a Union-wide Augean stable in which managers and workers at all levels ratted on one another in order to account for lapses in the state's absurdly high productivity standards. The persecution of innocents was a tragic, though perhaps unintended, by-product of the corruption and inefficiencies that went along with a backward nation so hastily modernizing in the wake of a revolution.

This work, however, is fraught with theoretical and analytical problems. From the preface, the author argues that "interpretations based on critical use of the internal records of the participants are better grounded than those that rely on the literary memoirs of ... exogenous victims of the process" (vii). He later in the introduction suggests that such writings were written with "dubious intentions" (p.4). The term "exogenous" could be debated, although most published memoirs of victims were written by individuals who had experience working and living within the Soviet Union. Their accounts, it would seem, reflect a general knowledge of the policies of the state from this time and, more specifically, a certain inside look at the terrorist methods imposed by the NKVD. Such accounts cannot be compared, however, with that organ's internal records, since such records are still unavailable. Although, because such accounts are typically critical of the state's policies of arrest, interrogation, prosecution, 'trial,' imprisonment, and forced labor, it follows that their intentions are remarkably indubitable: they were written for the purpose of denouncing the state's policies.

It would be one thing if the author were to suggest that such memoirs were written by embittered souls who, because they had fallen victim of a state in the throes of a cataclysmic development, simply lashed out against it. However, when such memoirs are cross compared, the stunning parallels and similarities of experiences lend cogency to the arc of each narrative. Two ideas are suggested by such similarities: that such memoirs accurately depict the experiences they convey, and that the authors were the victims of a well-organized and efficiently functioning terror.

It is odd, as well, that the author would stack internal records against such accounts, since it is possible such records reflect data the recorder believed his superiors might expect from him. In such a high pressure environment, in which workers were often purged for failing to meet highly expected standards, it must be difficult to tell which records are accurate reflections of past reality, and which have been adjusted by the recorder in order to cover [himself].

In another chapter, the author notes that "[I]f a member were [purged] he or she still had recourse. An elaborate appeals procedure extended through various levels... to which any expellee could finally appeal" (p. 43). This much is true. Although, this is as good a place as any for the author to advance his knowledge of the state's inefficiencies, for memoir accounts of appeals depict a snail's pace procedure without accountability. Appeals often took years, and quite often then were rejected in the course of a cursory review.

There are numerous other logical inconsistencies, such as the author's overall suggestion that Stalin would not have had the means to pull off such a large scale terror single-handedly, while at the same time arguing that [I]f he had wanted...to construct a plot to implicate everyone ... he could have done so without embarrassing dead-end investigations, censored and contradictory trial transcripts, and acquittals followed by convictions" (p. 127). The suggestion is that blunders that went along with the terror are indicative of an inefficient state going about its business, rather than the unavoidable trip ups involved in prosecuting certain difficult innocents.

Most important, the author's overall argument fails to account for the possibility of a trickle-down terror that very likely began with Stalin. His cutthroat demands of Yagoda, Yezhov, Molotov and others in high places could have effected their own demands of subordinates, and so on down the line. For instance, at one point the author notes that Molotov called for increased criticism of leaders. If Stalin had instilled fear in his men in order to raise productivity norms while at the same time quelling what were, or what were imagined to be, counterrevolutionary activity, this would have been a sensible demand to make of his henchmen. The resultant chaos that followed was a likely consequence of persons at all levels wishing to cover their [themselves].