Son of (Entropy)2: Personal Memories of a Son of a Chemist, Joseph E. Mayer, and a Nobel Prize Winning Physicist, Maria Goeppert Mayer

Peter C. Mayer
AuthorHouse (2011)
ISBN 9781463420697
Reviewed by Marty Shaw for Reader Views (9/11)


With “Son of (Entropy)2,” the author peels away the fancy, and prestigious, resumes of his parents to show the people he knew simply as mom and dad. This could be seen as a daunting task when you consider that his mom won two Nobel prizes and assisted with the Manhattan Project, while his father earned numerous awards and had the Joseph E. Mayer Chair of Theoretical Chemistry created in his honor at the University of California.

Even though the author provides some warning at the beginning by saying the book is a “collection of vignettes,” it was still a jarring experience to read about so many disjointed segments of life, with each segment having little to do with the segments that came either before or after. Just looking at each section, it’s easy to find plenty of amusing anecdotes, but there is no real flow or rhythm to the book, which prevented me from enjoying this dual memoir as much as I could have.

Joseph Mayer and his wife, Maria, were definitely interesting people to know, with Maria taking the majority of the spotlight in my eyes. Whether it was working for no pay simply because her husband was already employed at the same place or sharing her views during the war (“We’re fighting Hitler, not Germany”), Maria Goeppert Mayer constantly reveals herself to be a bright and thought-provoking woman.

In addition to the disjointed stories causing a problem, I thought it was a bad move to refer to the subjects of the book as Joe and Maria. The author makes no secret about these two being his parents so I saw no reason for placing that distance between himself and his parents. There are various sections of the book where he does use the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father,’ but there are many more sections where we simply read about Joe and Maria, and it became easy to forget that I was reading about a son sharing stories about his parents.

While “Son of (Entropy)2: Personal Memories of a Son of a Chemist, Joseph E. Mayer, and a Nobel Prize Winning Physicist, Maria Goeppert Mayer” won’t appeal to everyone, the book does a decent job of showing two exceptional individuals in an ordinary light.

Make comment on weblog

FTC Disclosure