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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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