Reviews for Lectures On Some Recent Advances in Physical Science with a Special Lecture On Force

The average rating for Lectures On Some Recent Advances in Physical Science with a Special Lecture On Force based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-28 00:00:00 Daniel Washburn The Sweet Science ranks number one on the Sports Illustrated best books of all time list. The book collects some of A.J. Liebling's boxing essays from The New Yorker . Liebling writes in a dry and sarcastic style, and even without knowing or caring much about boxing in the pre-Cassius Clay era of the 20th century I could still find the book enjoyable. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace's tennis essays. I don't care about tennis, but the writing brings and enjoyment to a topic that I would normally pay little or no attention to. This book was going to be the inaugural title in a sports themed series of books I had planned. I was going to peruse the SI list of books and for each sport represented in the list choose one book and read it. That way I'd read some authors and subjects I normally wouldn't be exposed to, and I'd feel like more of a man and know something about sports. Instead (I guess) I wound up feeling emasculated when I couldn't find the basketball book I wanted to read in the library database and then had my baseball and football book requests erased because the books didn't actually exist in the stacks. It didn't take much to be discouraged. I gave up. But I still read this book which is about guys hitting other guys in the face. Sometimes till they fall down and don't get back up for a bit. Liebling wrote these essays when the sport was going through a dark time. In the early to mid 1950's TV was interested in boxing and fights were being shown for free on the networks. Fight fans no longer had to go outside to enjoy a fight, they could watch high quality action in the comfort of their own home, and not have to pay for a ticket. This was great for people who didn't want to pay for a ticket, but for the fighters and the sport this was apparently awful. Before TV there existed a thriving fighting culture, local sports clubs and small time venues gave fighters a place to hone their skills. Fighters learned through experience, and could eke out a living from the the money they earned fighting in the small fights. Over time they got better. With TV the lower rungs of the fighting food-chain disappeared. New and exciting fighters were needed to keep things fresh, but without places to fight and the time it took to learn the 'sweet science' of connecting fist to face the quality of the new fighters was lacking. Poorer fighters meant poorer fights. Poorer fights sucked to watch and the whole sport began to fester. Liebling doesn't care for this state of affairs, and he sounds like the doomsayers of books versus digital reading machines. These essays are fun to read. He jabs and mocks with his words but there is a genuine love that he has for the subject, and the reader can tell that he has some experience first hand in having someone put their fist in your face (sadly, something I don't know really anything about and which makes me wonder how erudite say Joyce Carol Oates paeans to fighting can really be (why would this subject be any different that someone needs to have first hand knowledge to really write about something? I don't know but I think that our society has demonized while fetishizing violence that most of us have no real understanding of it, and I think it's a misunderstanding that is easiest to be overcome by being hit in the face by someone in a non-anger / irrational / bullying / exploitive manner (I also think that since John Updike died Joyce Carol Oates is our greatest living gigantic phony))). This is fine good writing, and can be of interest to anyone who appreciates the art of putting words after other words to make effective prose.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-16 00:00:00 Kevin Hawes I never really thought I would read a book about boxing. It's not a subject I'm very interested in or know much about. In fact, right before I started this book, I did a short review of all of the boxers I know by name and realized that I knew most of them from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire". Awesome. But when I found out that Sports Illustrated named this book as the best American sports book of all time, I figured I had to give it a read. I'm glad I did. The Sweet Science is a collection of essays about boxing that A.J. Liebling wrote for the New York in the early to mid 1950s. They cover some of the most famous boxers and fights of the day, including Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, and Archie Moore. I loved Liebling's voice and prose in these essays. Anyone who can reference both Dicken's Mr. Pickwick, Greek tragic heroes, and Euclidean geometry while writing about boxing is okay in my book. Reading his accounts of the fights made me feel like I was accompanying him there while he provided insightful commentary about tactics, society, and where the particular match belonged in boxing history (which, as a side note, I didn't realize went as far back as it does - Liebling would often refer to famous matches from the 1700s!). This book also did something I wouldn't have thought possible - it made me want to watch a boxing match. Liebling gave me an appreciation of the tactics and intelligence that is required of a good boxer. Prior to this book, I thought of boxing as purely about one guy being able to hit the other guy harder, but now I know that that is but one part of a larger game. Very cool.