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.
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.
