Yet Anton’s profiles ring true, and readers will enjoy learning of their triumphs.
Engaging profiles of seven scientists who took part in the breakthroughs of the 1990s.
Within a few years, researchers will identify each of the millions of units in the human genome. Much of the credit for that accomplishment must go to geneticist Craig Venter, who assembled the technology to sequence 25 genes per day—a spectacular improvement over the tedious lab work that preceded it. Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy led a pioneering team to an unpractical but utterly fascinating breakthrough: they discovered planets circling other stars. Brain research also entered a golden age in the 1990s, and Susan Greenfield was able to propose ingenious new theories to explain consciousness, the greatest mystery of brain function. Measuring light from unimaginably distant stars, Saul Perlmutter helped trigger a revolution in cosmology. It turns out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and the force driving this acceleration represents most of the energy in the universe. No one knows what it is. The 1990s saw another authentic revolution, this one in biology: Carl Woese discovered an entirely new kingdom, the archaebacteria. Bizarre microorganisms, they were probably the first living things on earth. Anton (Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, 1996) has done his homework. He knows that few prominent scientists nowadays fit the noble humanitarian mold of Jonas Salk or act the bashful genius like Einstein. Today they must perform on Oprah and talk in 30-second soundbites. Anton’s scientists are no shrinking violets: two are entrepreneurs, most are politically astute, and some are media stars. Since Anton writes from hindsight, their struggles end in success. Their opponents have their say but come across as wrong-headed and not very nice. This approach contravenes Stephen Jay Gould’s first principle of scientific controversy: those who are wrong are not more stupid or even less perceptive than those who are right. This seems paradoxical and most popular writers don’t subscribe to it.
Yet Anton’s profiles ring true, and readers will enjoy learning of their triumphs.Pub Date: June 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-7167-3512-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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