SOURCE: “From Thought to Expression,” in Nature, November 26, 1992, pp. 375–76.

In the following review, Schweber offers a positive assessment of Genius.

Scientific communities usually seek to convey the importance and the history of their discipline through the lives of their outstanding practitioners—individuals whose very creativity renders them unlikely to be the best representatives of their worlds. Physicists have principally chosen theorists as their heroic figures (Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli) or experimenters who left their mark in both experimentation and theory (J. J. Thomson, Rutherford, Fermi), thereby emphasizing the ties of the discipline to the tradition of natural philosophy. The cult idols are the reification of the aspirations and myths of the community and the embodiments of its cherished values. (And just as what is not said can be as revealing as what is, those left out of the hall of fame disclose much about the...