The Starship and the Canoe

It's difficult to quantify this book, odd which basically is about physicist Freeman Dyson and his son George, who at the time of the book, was living in a treehouse in British Columbia, designing a huge canoe based on Aleut kayaks.

The father-son dichotomy between the man who promoted the idea of space colonization via nuclear-powered starships, and the twenty-something hippy mystic drives the narrative. It's an interesting read, and Brower has some cogent observations, but it doesn't really satisfy. It just wanders up and down the gulf between the two men the way George's super-kayak wanders up and down the Inland Passage

This is a biography of the astrophysicist Freeman Dyson and his son George. Freeman was famously involved in NASA's Orion mission, and believed that humans needed to colonize space. George's ambitions were more earth-bound but no less wild: he built canoes and lived mostly on the water all along the West coast of Alaska and British Columbia. The two were estranged when George was young. Kenneth Brower was friends with both of them, and spent a lot of time traveling with George. This book culminates in their reunion after many years apart.

It's a charming book about two men who seem very different, yet share a lot of characteristics. More than that, it's about canoes and boating on the Pacific Northwest Coast. More than that, it's a show more snapshot of the lifestyles of a lot of coastal people in the PNW in the 1970s. It's also about how people who seem very different can usually find ways to get along, and about how humans relate to the world around them.

I had hoped for more information about Freeman and his theories, but the book focuses a lot more on George. If I didn't live in the PNW myself, I would probably have found this far less interesting. show less

An ideal book is you love physics and kayaking. Makes you want to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver and peddle up the Inside Passage.

biography of George Dyson and his father Freeman Dyson, the famous physicist; would have been better if more about Freeman Dyson, but good nevertheless; author shows the underlying similarities beneath the outward differences between father and son

A study of scientist Freeman Dyson and his science/technology-historian son George Dyson, and the conflicts and common ground between their interests and outlooks. Slow-moving, but rich.