New Book
In this inspiring coming-of-age memoir, a world-renowned astrophysicist emerges from an impoverished childhood and crime-filled adolescence to ascend through the top ranks of research physics. Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars—a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd”—dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity. Once admitted to the elite physics PhD program at Stanford University, James found himself pulled between the promise of a bright future and a dangerous crack cocaine habit he developed in college. With the encouragement of his mentor and the sole Black professor in the physics department, James confronted his personal demons as well as the entrenched racism and classism of the scientific establishment. When he finally seized his dream of a life in astrophysics, he adopted a new name, Hakeem Muata Oluseyi, to honor his African ancestors. Alternately heartbreaking and hopeful, A Quantum Life narrates one man’s remarkable quest across an ever-expanding universe filled with entanglement and choice.
About the Authors:
From Hakeem Oluseyi: I am an astrophysicist, author, STEM educator, multi-patented inventor, voice actor, TV personality, science communicator, and keynote speaker. I recently served as the Space Science Education Lead in the Space Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC where I provided strategic leadership and management for the SMD’s investments in science education and communications. Responsibilities included co-managing 25 Science Activation cooperative agreements totaling ~$40M, long-term vision definition and actualization, and oversight of programmatic planning, implementation, and assessment.
Joshua Horwitz is the cofounder and publisher of Living Planet Books in Washington, DC, which specializes in books by thought leaders in science, medicine, and psychology.
A Quantum Life by Hakeem Oluseyi, Joshua Horwitz, read by Hakeem Oluseyi
A Quantum Life by Hakeem Oluseyi, Joshua Horwitz Reviews:
“Hakeem Oluseyi’s journey to adulthood is not only lyrical but immensely expansive and powerful. Moving across the American West and South, A Quantum Life encompasses with equal grace matters of particle physics and matters of a fractured family, challenges that are self-wrought and challenges inflicted by racism, and triumphs over an academic landscape engineered against poor African Americans as well as triumphs of the human heart.”—Jeff Hobbs, New York Times bestselling author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
“Oluseyi’s book is an epic personal and scientific journey through a system stacked against him. . . . Haunting and heroic.”—Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at MIT, author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe
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