Collisions is less a character study than a picaresque, two-fisted tale of scientific derring-do ... Clear-eyed and resistant to hyperbole even when his subject would seem to warrant it, Nevala-Lee is the right man to take the measure of Alvarez ... With Collisions, his gift for making complex scientific ideas digestible and complex personalities vivid and present finds its most potent expression yet.
Collisions is a wonderfully rich, exciting and informative work. If it has a fault, it is the excess of technical detail with which it burdens the reader. It may seem churlish to say so, but Mr. Nevala-Lee, who has written a biography of Buckminster Fuller and a study of science fiction writers, simply knows too much about the intricacies of Alvarez’s work, and is too eager to share the bounteous fruits of his research with us. Yet his book is a remarkable achievement and a fitting monument to one of the most intricate and ingenious minds of the American century.
The physicist Luis Alvarez is one of those 20th-century figures whose life was so eventful that it should be catnip for a biographer ... It’s a tantalizing characterization. Just don’t get too excited ... In seeking to deflate the myth of the audacious Alvarez, [Nevala-Lee] has overcorrected, jettisoning drama and tension in favor of diligent explanation. The result is a thorough, dutiful parsing of Alvarez’s work in the laboratory and a strangely pallid portrait of the man himself ... I pulled most of these tidbits from Collisions; the morsels are there, but they’re drifting in a sea of detail. Such an emphasis might be deliberate, a willful refusal to indulge Alvarez’s self-serving self-presentation in order to focus the reader’s attention on what truly mattered: how his laboratories worked ... Bringing such a culture to life would be a challenge for any biographer. I appreciated Nevala-Lee’s careful research and his sense of obligation. But I finished the book bleary-eyed and worn out—and wanting something more.
Underscores the Nobel laureate’s restless, persistent intellect and his affinity for inconvenient hypotheses on controversial topics ... A nuanced portrait of a driven, probing scientific soul. And if Alvarez had some blind spots, Nevala-Lee reminds us that there remains a place for unbridled scientific creativity in today’s world.
Illuminating ... Nevala-Lee provides approachable breakdowns of Alvarez’s pioneering physics and a stimulating overview of his more eclectic latter-day pursuits, including using his background on particle collisions to debunk the theory of a second JFK shooter and to popularize the idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. It’s a solid overview of an accomplished life.
A thoroughly researched biography of an audacious scientist—and a new window into the history of high-energy physics ... For all of Alvarez’s adventures, Nevala-Lee’s narration seems at times too even-keeled, opting for staid detail over emotional resonance ... Nevala-Lee skillfully uses Alvarez’s story to provide a sweeping look at 20th-century physics, with its complicated ties to politics and culture, from the Manhattan Project to the Kennedy assassination.
