The Merely Personal by Jeremy Bernstein, Ivan R. Dee, $26, ISBN
1566633443
JEREMY BERNSTEIN is an emeritus professor of physics and was a writer for
The New Yorker for more than thirty years. The essays in this
collection, The Merely Personal, are outstanding for their lucidity and
their easy flow, rare virtues that any reader should delight in. This is
American straight-ahead prose at its best.
In fact, the scope is wide, involving such luminaries as John Donne, Niels
Bohr, the chess champion Bobby Fischer, Albert Einstein, Johannes Kepler,
Richard Feynman and Tom Stoppard’s plays. They are combined with personal…
