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Black Like Me, the brief, journalistic tale of a white man who travelled through the South posing as a Negro, is quickly becoming one of the minor classics in the literature of race. It describes, without embellishment, six weeks of constantly degrading experience. It leaves the reader literally sickened by a situation that is taken for granted in an entire section of his own country...
...great actor as well as a polished Machiavell. But one should remember that, except when self-doubt begins to gnaw at his innards towards the end of the final act, nothing he says (as contrasted with what the others say) is ever meant to be taken seriously by a reader, or by an audience...
Newman writes that "The collection is a miscellany because I have miscellaneous interests, yet it is not altogether helter-skelter. Perhaps the title, which, I will not deny, gave some difficulty, is reasonably descriptive." It is, and the two volumes are also largely descriptive writing. What will make a reader uneasy are the occasional flirts with analysis and elliptical judgments: these offer unblushingly direct ideas of what Newman's interests mean to him but an oblique and unsatisfactory view of his criteria of judgment on men of science...
...essays show Newman as a knowledgeable writer whose diverse curiosities have taken him beyond an interest in the better-known men of science to figures and folios which the Scientific American reader wouldn't otherwise reach. I'm not sure that his mixture of explicit summary and speculative essay is altogether a good thing. Newman's four-volume compilation of mathematical writings The World of Mathematics is a classic editorial feat; Mathematics and the Imagination (which Newman wrote with the late mathematician Edward Kasner) was, on the other hand, an original work that popularized lucidly some nontrivial aspects of mathematics...
This sort of statement raises a number of questions which the writer ignores If they can't be answered within limits of his review they should at least be acknowledged; the reader who senses them is going to be distictly uncomfortable. Is it important to a cosmology that the natural constants remain constant? If so, why is it? If we can't decide whether it's crucial? why not? The questions are not trivial; the answers aren't obvious. Newman has begged them, then passed judgement on Eddington's contributions without indicating where he stands on the points of difference...