Almost seventy-five years after their initial publication, Aaron Copland’s Norton lectures, published as Music and Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), still make for engaging reading alongside his younger friend and fellow composer Leonard Bernstein’s The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Richard Feynman published a number of books on physics directed at the inquisitive nonscientist. The three talks he delivered at the University of Washington in 1963 as part of the Jesse and John Danz Lecture Series became the core of the 1998 project his children published ten years after their father’s death: Michelle and Carl Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (New York: Perseus Books, 1998). Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1994), a collection of six of the most accessible chapters from Feynman’s 1963 book Lectures on Physics (Boston: Addison-Wesley), which was prepared for publication by Robert B. Leighton and Matthew L. Sands, offers more food for thought. Physicist Leonard Mlodinow’s portrait, Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (New York: Warner Books, 2003), provides readers with a series of lively, wide-ranging exchanges between the two men.
André Aciman’s beautiful memoir Out of Egypt (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994) offers readers a striking portrait of a particular Sephardic Jewish family as well as a sensuous evocation of Alexandria prior to Nasser.
Alfred Einstein’s Mozart: His Character, His Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945) remains a standard of Mozart studies. Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) offers insight into the life as well as the work of this composer. Two shorter and eminently readable studies are Peter Gay’s Mozart: A Life (New York: Viking Adult, 1999) and Paul Johnson’s Mozart: A Life (New York: Viking Adult, 2013).
The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ed. Adele Berlin, Mark Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane, provides thoroughgoing notes. For the first five books of the Bible, Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses offers extensive commentary. His The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018) weighs in at 3,500 pages but provides extensive historical context as well as brilliant commentary.
Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999) and The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Knopf, 2003) provide an excellent if densely written pair of volumes introducing twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments in theoretical physics and string theory. Simon Singh’s lively and lucent Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (New York: 4th Estate, 2004) offers an excellent introduction to cosmology. Caleb Scharf’s The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities (New York: Scientific American/FSG, 2014) provides a meditation at once down-to-earth and poetic on how we can understand scientific developments in cosmology while keeping in mind our particular location far from the center of our own galaxy.
Feynman’s two memoirs—“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character”(with Ralph Leighton; New York: W. W. Norton, 1985) and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character (with Ralph Leighton; New York: W. W. Norton, 1988)—are inimitable Feynman: down-to-earth and deftly pitched to a general audience. James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Vintage, 1993) provides an expansive and beautifully written portrait of this physicist.
There are as many hundreds of excellent meditations and biographies of Einstein as there are of Mozart. I found Corey S. Powell’s God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion (New York: Free Press, 2002) useful as a study of Einstein’s science over and against his penchant for mystery. Peter Galison’s engaging Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003) historicizes time and in so doing provides thoughtful and often overlooked context on the scientist’s discovery of relativity. Einstein’s The World as I See It (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1979) should be required reading for anyone who wishes to learn more about Einstein’s attitudes on ethics as well as science. I found Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives, selected and edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), equally indispensable as a window into his thought.
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005) is the first full-scale biography of this American scientist and makes for thoughtful reading.
I relied heavily on Orlando Figes’s twin studies of Russian history and culture—A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996) and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador, 2002)—which provide thoroughgoing introductions to Chagall’s and Rothko’s birthplaces. Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (1970; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1999), the first of two memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam detailing life with husband and poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934 and who died in 1938 as one of many victims of Stalin’s purges, speaks directly and urgently to political tensions during the first decades of the Soviet period.
Stanley Kunitz’s brilliant translations of Akhmatova can be found in The Collected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000) as well as in Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
James E. B. Breslin’s magisterial Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) remains the first study of the painter and the best place for readers to start who wish to learn more about this painter’s life and work. Christopher Rothko’s Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015) offers a thoughtful reexamination of his father’s work.
Along with its beautiful color plates, Jacob Baal-Teshuva’s commentary on Chagall’s work in Marc Chagall: 1887–1985 (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003) is a thorough and engaging study. Chagall’s lilting autobiography My Life (New York: Da Capo, 1960) is as indispensable as it is engrossing. Bella Chagall’s Burning Lights (1946; repr., New York: Schocken, 1962) is equally readable and includes thirty-six of the artist’s line drawings.
For general background on twentieth-century music, Alex Ross’s lively The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: FSG, 2007) is very helpful. Readers wishing to concentrate more fully on music theory writ large as well as the long history of musical scales (pentatonic and heptatonic) can learn a great deal from Stuart Isacoff’s fascinating Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (New York: Vintage, 2001).
Copland is an excellent guide to his own music. Copland on Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963) offers a representative sample of his writings. His two-volume autobiography, written in conjunction with Vivian Perlis—Copland: 1900–1942 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984) and Copland Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989)—provides an excellent record of his career. Howard Pollack does justice to his life and work in Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
I found Pollack’s excellent and definitive study George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) immensely useful. For sources contemporary with this composer, Isaac Goldberg’s George Gershwin: A Study in American Music (1931; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1958) cannot be equaled. Merle Armitage’s George Gershwin, Man and Legend (1958; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1995) is excellent, and Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson’s The George Gershwin Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) showcases a broad range of perspectives on Gershwin.
Though it is fiction, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) offers a brilliant study of Russian Jewish immigration in the early twentieth century even as it provides a somber lyric counterpoint to Gershwin’s musical effervescence.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, trans. J. G. Nichols (circa 1350–55; repr., London: Hesperus Press, 2002), was written less than thirty years after Dante’s death and so carries the distinction not only of its author but of the fact that it provides a window into Dante and the politics of his time during his own period. I relied as well on Barbara Reynolds’s Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: Shoemaker Hoard Press, 2006), Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York: NYRB, 2001), and R. W. B. Lewis’s Dante (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001).
For readers willing to take the time to work their way through it, Carole Angier’s The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography (New York: FSG, 2002) provides a fulsome look at Levi. Levi’s beautiful memoir The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (1975; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1984), provides the most acute insights into his early years, his work as a chemist, and the aftermath of Auschwitz and closes with a particularly elegant and life-affirming essay, “Carbon.” A collection of his unpublished stories translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastaglia as A Tranquil Star: Primo Levi, Unpublished Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007) offers oblique but fascinating perspectives on his life and world.
For general philosophical background I found Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) very readable and extraordinarily compelling.
James Atlas’s Bellow, A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000) has now largely been supplanted by Zachary Leader’s capacious and commanding approach to the writer in two volumes The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 (New York: Vintage, 2015) and The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strive, 1965–2005 (New York: Vintage, 2018). Son Gregory Bellow provides a candid and direct appraisal of his father in Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury, USA, 2013). Edward Mendelson’s elegant essay on Bellow in Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York: NYRB, 2015) follows Bellow’s own lead in its yoking of aesthetics and ethics.
First and foremost, I relied upon Mandelbrot’s exuberant memoir The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick (New York: Pantheon, 2012). Mandelbrot’s introduction to his textbook The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977; repr., New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983) provides an intriguing, accessible overview of his mathematics. The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking, ed. Nina Samuels (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2012), considers links between images and numerals in Mandelbrot’s thought. The 2004 Jubilee publication Fractal Geometry and Applications: A Jubilee of Benoit Mandelbrot, ed. Michel L. Lapidus and Machiel van Frankenhuijsen (Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society), provides more technical field-specific studies of applications of Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry.
James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (1987; repr., New York: Penguin, 2008) offers readers a stellar introduction to chaos theory more largely.
To my mind, Paley on Paley is irresistible. I found Just As I Thought (New York: FSG, 1998) as direct and down-to-earth as it is brilliant. Readers can find her three volumes of stories collected in The Collected Stories (New York: FSG, 1994).