Books by Robert Kanigel on Google Play

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JEREMY IRONS AND DEV PATEL!

A moving and enlightening look at the unbelievable true story of how gifted prodigy Ramanujan stunned the scholars of Cambridge University and revolutionized mathematics.

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, but left behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed for its secrets today.

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs

Robert Kanigel

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence can still be felt in any discussion of urban planning to this day.

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates--all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets, while amassing the knowledge she would draw upon to write her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here, too, is the activist who helped lead an ultimately successful protest against Robert Moses's proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village; and who, in order to keep her sons out of the Vietnam War, moved to Canada, where she became as well known and admired as she was in the United States.

Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, a Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books

Robert Kanigel

Vintage Reading brings eighty of the world's most unforgettable books out from behind the high castle walls, lowers the drawbridge, and welcomes readers inside. With lively and concise commentary, award-winning author Robert Kanigel throws an arm around the reader and becomes the tour guide to classics, best-sellers, lesser-known greats, and everything in-between. From St. Augustine's Confessions to Dorothy Parker's Stories, Kanigel presents a unique collection of essays unlike any other stuffy attempt at introducing the modern reader to Great Books.Vintage Reading is welcoming. It opens the door to eighty good books rather than post stern-faced guards around them. Before writing his critically acclaimed titles The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, Kanigel penned these essays to guide time-starved bibliophiles to important books they may have missed. The essays appeared in such publications as Baltimore's Evening Sun, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, and The Los Angeles Times. Vintage Reading brings eighty of the world's most unforgettable books out from behind the high castle walls, lowers the drawbridge, and welcomes readers inside.With lively and concise commentary, award-winning author Robert Kanigel throws an arm around the reader and becomes the tour guide to: Books That Shaped the Western World Books on Everyone's List of Literary Classics Books on Many a List for Burning Lighter Fare: Good Reads, Best Sellers One-of-a-Kinds But I Know What I Like: Books on Aesthetics & Style Making Hard Work Easy: Great Works of Popularization Not Robinson Crusoe...Lesser Known Classics The Realm of the Spirit: Holy & Human From St. Augustine's Confessions to Dorothy Parker's Stories, Kanigel presents a unique collection of essays unlike any other stuffy attempt at introducing the modern reader to Great Books.Vintage Reading is welcoming. It opens the door to eighty good books rather than post stern-faced guards around them. Before writing his critically acclaimed titles The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, Kanigel penned these essays to guide time-starved bibliophiles to important books they may have missed. The essays appeared in such publications as Baltimore's Evening Sun, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, and The Los Angeles Times.

Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes

Robert Kanigel

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 fourteenth century, fabric was treated with special oils to make it resemble leather. In the 1870s came Leatherette, a new bookbinding material. The twentieth century gave 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 does.

Perhaps more than any other natural material, leather stands for the authentic and the genuine. 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 a 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.

On an Irish Island

Robert Kanigel

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.

Der das Unendliche kannte: Das Leben des genialen Mathematikers Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ausgabe 2

Robert Kanigel

Der Bericht über das vielleicht größte mathematische Genie des 20. Jahrhunderts liest sich wie ein spannender Roman.

Der das Unendliche kannte: Das Leben des genialen Mathematikers Srinivasa Ramanujan

Robert Kanigel

Audiobooks

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

Robert Kanigel

In 1913, a young, unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, begging that pre-eminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Hardy, realizing the letter was the work of a genius, arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most remarkable collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and teeming 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, but left behind a magical and inspired legacy that today is still being plumbed for its secrets.

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs

Robert Kanigel

Ebooks

Audiobooks