An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose.
A tale of the resurrection of the woolly mammoth and how “biology and genetics [have] gone from passive observation to active creation.”
Bestselling author Mezrich (Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs, 2016, etc.) is a fine storyteller who likes offbeat topics. Film producers snap up his books (The Social Network, 21), including this one. The author describes this one as a “dramatic narrative account,” and he opens with something out of a Michael Crichton novel: 3,000 years ago, a 200-pound mammoth calf is born, and he’s “the last of his kind.” Fast-forward to today, where we meet Dr. George Church—“fast becoming the face of the genetic revolution”—in his lab at Harvard Medical School. This is his story as well as the story of the many graduate students working with him on genetic engineering. Their goal is to genetically engineer synthetically sequenced woolly mammoth genes in Asian elephant cells. Meanwhile, Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist, has been working at his own science center in Siberia studying the permafrost, a “land mass covering as much as 20 percent of the Earth’s surface.” Zimov’s research revealed that it “held a devastating secret”—it was a “ticking time bomb.” As the Arctic warms, the permafrost begins to melt, releasing carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air. Eventually, it would “release more carbon than would be created by burning all the forests on Earth three times over,” an event that “could suffocate the world.” If, Church speculated, a new generation of mammoths could be created and returned to their Siberian grazing grounds, then maybe the ecology of the late Pleistocene could be re-created and defuse the bomb. Mezrich recounts Church’s career and accomplishments in genetics as he works toward achieving this lofty goal. Along the way, he also highlights important issues in wildlife conservation. There’s a lot of science here, but on the whole, Mezrich does a good job of making it accessible.
An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3555-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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