by Darel Preble , Donna Salisbury , Joseph Osepchuk and Bob Edwards ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A significant but less-than-riveting first-person account by a pioneer in energy technology.
Preble et al. collect several journals of celebrated engineer William C. Brown in this first volume in a series.
Brown is remembered primarily for being the first person to propose and then demonstrate Microwave Power Transmission, in which electrical energy is transferred using electromagnetic waves. The discovery has great potential application for solar energy, making it possible—as Preble notes in his introduction—to “efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively bring the continuously available sunshine at geosynchronous orbit back to power Earth’s growing electric power grids.” Brown used ingenuity and experimentation to develop the key piece of technology—he called it the “rectenna”—to make MPT possible in 1964, which is also the year that this volume begins. The four journals track Brown’s progress through 1975, including accounts of his first demonstration of MPT on national television, when he powered a small helicopter using a microwave beam for CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Later, Apollo 11 carried another of Brown’s inventions, the Amplitron, on its mission to the moon, using it to broadcast back to Earth the video and audio of Neil Armstrong’s famous first lunar step. Over the course of the decade covered here, Brown documents how technology slowly advanced: truly one day at a time. Brown’s voice is workmanlike but warm, and there are moments when his satisfaction at his hard work shine through his usual professional exterior, as this entry from four days after the moon landing show: “In my own small way, I felt that I had really contributed through the communications system, which brought back the TV and the voice and the telemetering from the Moon. The 20-watt Amplitron did its job well.” However, for every historic moment, there are a hundred pages of fairly unremarkable entries covering the development of Brown’s work and his daily interactions with family and colleagues. Posterity should be grateful that the scientist wrote so much down and that it is now being published, but it’s difficult to see many outside of Brown’s field reading the entirety of this over 500-page volume, much less the full series of intended volumes.
A significant but less-than-riveting first-person account by a pioneer in energy technology.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63183-438-7
Page Count: 530
Publisher: The Space Solar Power Institute
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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