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http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-time-traveller/2007/12/07/1196813003677.html
"The Time Traveller. On May 22, 1955, Ronald Mallett's father, a 33-
year-old TV repairman from the Bronx, died of a sudden heart attack.
Mallett (pronounced M'lette) was 10 years old and the trauma of the
event, not unnaturally, knocked him for six. A year later, he read
H.G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine, which gave him the idea
to build a device that would allow him to return to 1955 and save his
father's life. So far the story is fabulous, painful and babyish, the
stuff of Hollywood - but fast-forward 47 years to June 2002 and the
same Ronald Mallett, now professor of theoretical physics at the
University of Connecticut, is delivering a paper in Washington to
about 50 physicists at an International Association for Relativistic
Dynamics conference, in which he explains how a machine involving a
circuit of lasers could, in theory, send a particle backwards in time.
It has long been known that Einstein's relativity allows for certain
forms of theoretical time travel. If you whizz off into outer space at
the speed of light, you will find upon your return that time passed
much quicker for those on Earth than it did for you in your
rocket......Mallett is still working on his prototype, which he
believes is capable of creating a closed loop in time. "As for
travelling into the past, I believe it will ultimately happen," he
says, but the tragedy he concedes is that he will never get to see his
father again even if his machine is ready by tomorrow: for it will
only allow him back as far as the moment when it was first switched
on......As a psychological portrait of a person irreparably damaged by
the death of a parent and of a theoretical physicist anxious that he
will never be taken seriously because he is black, working on time
machines and driven by emotion, this book makes for absorbing
reading.....When the quantum physicist Bryce DeWitt heard Mallett
expounding his theories for the first time, he told him: "I don't know
if you will ever see your father again; but I do know he would have
been proud of you." This triggered a great deal of emotion in
Mallett's vibrant heart. "I began to feel whole for the first time in
many years," he wrote. The book ends with the professor sobbing in the
arms of his 82-year-old mother."

Pentcho Valev
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