A welcome and accessible addition to the history of science, and an object lesson in the perils of scientific amorality.
Well-told life of a little-known but important scientist.
Fritz Haber “fits no convenient category,” writes science journalist Charles (Lords of the Harvest, 2002, etc.). “Haber was both hero and villain; a Jew who was also a German patriot; a victim of the Nazis who was accused of war crimes himself.” It is in the last connection that Haber figures in history. A highly skilled chemist working at the boundaries of physics and chemistry, Haber and industrial engineer Carl Bosch developed a system by which to extract nitrogen from the air, link it to hydrogen and fix it in the form of ammonia, a potentially limitless source of plant fertilizer. The process, Charles reckons, is responsible for feeding nearly half of the world’s population today. But the same method, with some tweaking, allowed Germany to manufacture munitions in the absence of imported nitrate, prevented from entering the country by a British naval blockade. Haber’s subsequent work in developing chemical weapons horrified his friend Albert Einstein; Charles rather charitably attributes at least some of Haber’s interest to the “intellectual challenge” of making possible a new kind of warfare, but Einstein foresaw what happens when science is put into the service of politics by other means. Charles observes that of a total count of 20 million dead and wounded, chemical weapons “account for a relatively small number of these casualties . . . about 650,000 people” on the Western Front. (The toll from the German use of gas in Russia and Poland is unknown.) This is not to excuse Haber, for Charles adds that though gas is an old technology, the industrial manufacture of death-dealing tools is ongoing, and Haber was a pioneer. Haber was well aware of this, remarking toward the end of his life, an exile in Switzerland at the dawn of a dangerous age, that his contributions were “like fire in the hands of small children.”
A welcome and accessible addition to the history of science, and an object lesson in the perils of scientific amorality.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056272-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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