Review by Choice Review
Peter Kapitsa (or Kapitza, 1894-1984) was probably the best experimental physicist that Russia has ever produced, and his career in two countries covers the emergence of his discipline from a matter of sealing wax, ingenuity, and bits of wire to the systematic investigation of nature, often under extreme conditions of very high or very low temperatures, intense magnetic fields, etc. After starting his career at Cambridge University in 1921, he soon became a leading fixture of Cambridge science. On a visit home in 1934 he was detained without warning by the political authorities and obliged to start work over again. Though he built a laboratory in Moscow and did important work there, his greatest achievements were in Cambridge. His youthful letters about life in England are charming; later letters to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the other tyrants, in his struggles to get people treated justly, sometimes to get them out of prison, show the courage, as the editors put it, of a man who jumps naked into a den of lions. Three-quarters of the book is letters; the editors' biographical memoir describes the scenes of Kapitsa's life and labors and outlines the scientific achievements of this remarkable engineer, physicist, organizer, public citizen, and lover of the arts. Undergraduates and up. D. Park Williams College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review