Robert Kanigel

Soon to be a major motion picture, the story of one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled, between a young unschooled Indian prodigy and a great English mathematician.In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition," tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof." In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of thirty-two and left behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed for its secrets today.

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day.Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates--all of which she won. Robert Kanigel's revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses's proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.

On an Irish Island is a love letter to a vanished way of life, in which Robert Kanigel, the highly praised author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way , tells the story of the Great Blasket, a wildly beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, renowned during the early twentieth century for the rich communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke. With the Irish language vanishing all through the rest of Ireland, the Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars and writers drawn there during the Gaelic renaissance—and the scene for a memorable clash of cultures between modern life and an older, sometimes sweeter world slipping away. Kanigel introduces us to the playwright John Millington Synge, some of whose characters in The Playboy of the Western World , were inspired by his time on the island; Carl Marstrander, a Norwegian linguist who gave his place on Norway’s Olympic team for a summer on the Blasket; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a Celtic studies scholar fresh from the Sorbonne; and central to the story, George Thomson, a British classicist whose involvement with the island and its people we follow from his first visit as a twenty-year-old to the end of his life. On the island, they met a colorful coterie of men and women with whom they formed lifelong and life-changing friendships. There’s Tomás O’Crohan, a stoic fisherman, one of the few islanders who could read and write Irish, who tutored many of the incomers in the language’s formidable intricacies and became the Blasket’s first published writer; Maurice O’Sullivan, a good-natured prankster and teller of stories, whose memoir, Twenty Years A-Growing , became an Irish classic; and Peig Sayers, whose endless repertoire of earthy tales left listeners spellbound. As we get to know these men and women, we become immersed in the vivid culture of the islanders, their hard lives of fishing and farming matched by their love of singing, dancing, and talk. Yet, sadly, we watch them leave the island, the village becoming uninhabited by 1953. The story of the Great Blasket is one of struggle—between the call of modernity and the tug of Ireland’s ancient ways, between the promise of emigration and the peculiar warmth of island life amid its physical isolation. But ultimately it is a tribute to the strength and beauty of a people who, tucked away from the rest of civilization, kept alive a nation’s past, and to the newcomers and islanders alike who brought the island’s remarkable story to the larger world.

From the author of the best-selling The Man Who Knew Infinity, comes an unprecedented look at the traditional master-apprentice relationship alive today in modern science. Robert Kanigel takes us into the heady world of a remarkable group of scientists working at the National Institutes of Health and the Johns Hopkins a dynasty of American researchers who for more than forty years have made Nobel Prize-and Lasker Award-winning breakthroughs in biomedical science. He brilliantly captures the drama of fine minds and explosice personalities at work-whether Bernard Brodie and Julius Axelrod discovering a new wonder drug called Tylenol or Solomon Snyder and Candace Pert unlocking the chemical secrets of the brain. And as we watch ideas debated, expierments working and failing, careers and relationships tested, and professional honors lost and won, we see close up all that is so deeply human in the practice of science. In a new epilogue to this edition, Kanigel brings us up-to-date on the lives and careers of these unforgettable personalities.

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature.In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the Darwin of Homeric studies. So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a before Parry and an after. Kanigel describes the before, when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were written texts, the way we think of most literature; and the after that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three.From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of oral theory, which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.

A young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor chose a factory over Harvard,and his decision has made all the difference in the world as we know it today. Using what he'd learned as an apprentice in a machine shop, Taylor forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management--the source of our fierce, unholy obsession with "efficiency." According to management guru Peter Drucker, Taylorism is perhaps the "most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." Evoking a time when the industrial world was young, new, and exciting , Robert Kanigel illuminates the man whose ceaseless quest for "the one best way" changed the very texture and purpose of twentieth-century life.

A readable, friendly, literary companion, Kanigel shares the books he loves best. Vintage Reading is like those samples that seduce you into tasting because Kanigel’s enthusiastic eclecticism makes it clear that a good reader is really someone ready to venture between the covers, and Kanigel’s mini-forays between those covers seem cozy not intimidating. The antidote to Cliff’s Notes, Vintage Reading’s unpretentious appetite for literature will inspire readers young and old to new adventures and, most importantly, a confidence in themselves.ROBERT KANIGEL is a National Book Critics Award finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, winner of the Grady-Stack award for science writing, and winner of “Author of the Year" honors in 1998 by the 1200-member American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). His The One Best Way was one of four finalists for the Global Business Book Award for biography, co-sponsored by the Financial Times of London and the management consulting firm of Booz-Allen. The Man Who Knew Infinity is now in its fifth paperback printing. His fourth book, High How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years, is due to be published in June 2002 by Viking Press.His articles and essays have been published in magazines such as The Sciences, American Health, and The New York Times Magazine. His book reviews have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. For many years, he taught writing in the Publications Design Program at the University of Baltimore. Since September 1999, Kanigel has been professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and administrator of its new Graduate Program in Science Writing. A Kanigel talk on Vintage Reading was broadcast on C-Span's "About Books" in August 1998.

Nice is the queen of the Cote d'Azur. Founded by the Greeks some time after the 6th century BC, it has borne the tread of Roman legionnaires and Italy-bound Englishmen on the Grand Tour as well as Lost Generation literati from Hemingway to Fitzgerald. Since the late 19th century it has been known as a "pleasure capital", and now tourism is its beating heart. But how did this happen? What was it that changed not just Nice or the French Riviera, but our leisure habits as a whole? This is a book about pleasure and escape - about what five months or five days in a strikingly beautiful, foreign place, wrested from lives choked with stress and toil back home, meant to a few wealthy people 250 years ago, and mean to millions more of more modest means today. It is about how modern tourism got the way it did. It is about how Nice and the Riviera became what they are; and about the price they paid to do so.

Celebrated essayist, biographer, and non-fiction book writer Robert Kanigel presents a memoir of his meandering, serendipitous path from engineer to writer. Kanigel invites the reader back in time for a journey rich with a sense of time and place, beginning with his childhood as the son of Jewish parents in Brooklyn. He attends Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then moves to Baltimore and begins working at an ammunition lab. The Vietnam War lurks as a shadow just offstage, coloring his need for work and various engineering jobs he takes. He pursues a string of romances, all ending in heartbreak, until he meets Maura, a firebrand of a woman pursuing her Ph. D. in biology, who beckons him to Europe, where he spends several lonely months as an anglophone in Paris. Spared the military draft by a high lottery number, he returns to Baltimore with Maura, finally quits his engineering job, and becomes a writer, “not,” Kanigel says, “because I decided to become a writer, but because I began to write.” His first writing job, a series of essays for a local paper he proposed on a whim, spirals into a prestigious career. Kanigel is not the hero of his own story, but his sometimes self-deprecating honesty makes for a deeply moving tale of a young man who, in his words, “muddled” his way into writing.

What makes genuine leather genuine? What makes real things...real? In an age of virtual reality, veneers, synthetics, plastics, fakes, and knockoffs, it's hard to know. Over the centuries, men and women have devoted enormous energy to making fake things seem real. As early as the 14th century, fabric was treated with special oils to make it resemble leather. In the 1870s came Leatherette, a new bookbinding material. The 20th century has given us Fabrikoid, Naugahyde, Corfam, and Ultrasuede. Each claims to transcend leather's limitations, to do better than nature itself - or at least to convince consumers that it has. Perhaps more than any other natural material, leather stands for the authentic and the genuine; Genuineleather, like a single German word, is how we think of it. Its animal roots etched in its pores and in the swirls of its grain, leather serves as cultural shorthand for the virtues of the real over the synthetic, the original over the copy, the luxurious over the shoddy and second-rate. From formica, vinyl siding, and particle board to cubic zirconium, knockoff designer bags, and genetically altered foods, inspired fakes of every description fly the polyester pennant of a brave new man-made world. Each represents an often passionate journey of scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial innovation. "Faux Real" explores this borderland of the almost-real, the ersatz, and the fake, illuminating a centuries-old culture war between the authentic and the imitative.

The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Marathi)

The Man Who Knew Infinity : A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Odia)

The story of the making, loss, and recovery of some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, raising questions about ancient mosaic art and its creation, the work of archaeology, and museum practice.In 1932, after years of fundraising and flurries of letters back and forth, an archaeological team from Princeton University gathered in Antioch, Syria. They expected to find sculptures, frescos, palace walls, and busts. Instead, all across this ancient Roman metropolis, they stumbled upon one site after another of extraordinary mosaic treasure, incomparable in number, quality, and historical significance. There were some three hundred of them in all, glories of color and design, stones and pieces of glass heaped up into spectacular images. Many of them were vast, room-sized tableaus, commissioned by wealthy Antiochenes for their villas. They depict banquets, drinking contests, olive harvests; lions, leopards, peacocks, and gazelles; legends, scenes from mythology, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus and Dionysus. Though dated to early in the Christian era, they are unabashedly pagan; the animals and plants they depict are so life-like scholars can often identify them by species. A vast, collectively obsessive outpouring of industry and effort, art and artisanship, they stand for beauty, the drive to make it, and the human need to have it as part of life. The eight-year dig at Antioch was an astonishing human enterprise, one that survived Depression-era financial downturns, interpersonal conflict, and the looming threat of World War II. Gained were mosaics that ultimately ended up in museums around the world—Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Paris’s Louvre, and more than a dozen others. But while an archaeological triumph, shedding new light on the ancient world, it also raised profound questions about the nature and progress of art. Who has a right to a work of art—the country of origin or the archaeologists who dig it up? Is art more interesting for its beauty, its history, or the craft and intelligence that goes into its making? What elevates a craftsperson into an artist? Robert Kanigel tackles these questions and more, breathing life into this landmark adventure of intellect and discovery.

The story of the making, loss, and recovery of some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, raising questions about ancient mosaic art and its creation, the work of archaeology, and museum practice.In 1932, after years of fundraising and flurries of letters back and forth, an archaeological team from Princeton University gathered in Antioch, Syria. They expected to find sculptures, frescos, palace walls, and busts. Instead, all across this ancient Roman metropolis, they stumbled upon one site after another of extraordinary mosaic treasure, incomparable in number, quality, and historical significance. There were some three hundred of them in all, glories of color and design, stones and pieces of glass heaped up into spectacular images. Many of them were vast, room-sized tableaus, commissioned by wealthy Antiochenes for their villas. They depict banquets, drinking contests, olive harvests; lions, leopards, peacocks, and gazelles; legends, scenes from mythology, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus and Dionysus. Though dated to early in the Christian era, they are unabashedly pagan; the animals and plants they depict are so life-like scholars can often identify them by species. A vast, collectively obsessive outpouring of industry and effort, art and artisanship, they stand for beauty, the drive to make it, and the human need to have it as part of life. The eight-year dig at Antioch was an astonishing human enterprise, one that survived Depression-era financial downturns, interpersonal conflict, and the looming threat of World War II. Gained were mosaics that ultimately ended up in museums around the world—Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Paris’s Louvre, and more than a dozen others. But while an archaeological triumph, shedding new light on the ancient world, it also raised profound questions about the nature and progress of art. Who has a right to a work of art—the country of origin or the archaeologists who dig it up? Is art more interesting for its beauty, its history, or the craft and intelligence that goes into its making? What elevates a craftsperson into an artist? Robert Kanigel tackles these questions and more, breathing life into this landmark adventure of intellect and discovery.

The story of the making, loss, and recovery of some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, raising questions about ancient mosaic art and its creation, the work of archaeology, and museum practice.In 1932, after years of fundraising and flurries of letters back and forth, an archaeological team from Princeton University gathered in Antioch, Syria. They expected to find sculptures, frescos, palace walls, and busts. Instead, all across this ancient Roman metropolis, they stumbled upon one site after another of extraordinary mosaic treasure, incomparable in number, quality, and historical significance. There were some three hundred of them in all, glories of color and design, stones and pieces of glass heaped up into spectacular images. Many of them were vast, room-sized tableaus, commissioned by wealthy Antiochenes for their villas. They depict banquets, drinking contests, olive harvests; lions, leopards, peacocks, and gazelles; legends, scenes from mythology, Cupid and Psyche, Narcissus and Dionysus. Though dated to early in the Christian era, they are unabashedly pagan; the animals and plants they depict are so life-like scholars can often identify them by species. A vast, collectively obsessive outpouring of industry and effort, art and artisanship, they stand for beauty, the drive to make it, and the human need to have it as part of life. The eight-year dig at Antioch was an astonishing human enterprise, one that survived Depression-era financial downturns, interpersonal conflict, and the looming threat of World War II. Gained were mosaics that ultimately ended up in museums around the world—Harvard University, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Paris’s Louvre, and more than a dozen others. But while an archaeological triumph, shedding new light on the ancient world, it also raised profound questions about the nature and progress of art. Who has a right to a work of art—the country of origin or the archaeologists who dig it up? Is art more interesting for its beauty, its history, or the craft and intelligence that goes into its making? What elevates a craftsperson into an artist? Robert Kanigel tackles these questions and more, breathing life into this landmark adventure of intellect and discovery.