What America Means: Poet Muriel Rukeyser on the Source of Character and Creativity

“Creation is a delicate and experimental thing… Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.”

In a lifetime of reading, there are few books I have loved more than Willard Gibbs: American Genius (public library) by the poet Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980): her magnificent more-than-biography of the lonely forgotten visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum p...