Without a Map: a Memoir

Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector where he sang like Roy Orbison, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal.

In this book, the author writes freely and often humorously about his life, beginning with his earliest childhood days. He describes his survival of American bombing raids when he was a teenager in Japan, his emergence as a researcher in a post-war university system that was seriously deficient, and his life as a mature mathematician in Princeton and in the international academic community. Every page of this memoir contains personal observations and striking stories. Such luminaries as Chevalley, Oppenheimer, Siegel, and Weil figure prominently in its anecdotes.