A captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds.
The wonderfully witty Friedman (A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, 2001) moves on to a more serious subject: the heralded aviator’s partnership with a Nobel Prize–winning surgeon on innovations that laid the groundwork for organ transplants, cryosurgery and the artificial heart.
They met in 1930, three years after his solo transatlantic flight made Charles Lindbergh a household name, and 18 after Dr. Alexis Carrel won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in cutting and reconnecting blood vessels. Lindbergh had radical ideas about repairing heart valves and installing pumps to replace ailing hearts that were, Dr. Carrel informed him, unfeasible with contemporary technologies. But Carrel invited Lindbergh to observe and then join his experiments in vascular surgery and tissue culture at the Rockefeller Institute. Friedman delineates the subsequent collaboration of this unlikely pair in a fast-paced, energetic text that reads like a novel. Science was Lindbergh’s true love, which was fostered by his parents. Carrel was a quirky Frenchman who dabbled in the paranormal, gave advice on marriage in Reader’s Digest and penned a bestseller on the destiny of man. His laboratory became a refuge for the reluctant celebrity, particularly after the much publicized kidnapping of Lindbergh’s infant son in 1932. Working under Carrel’s supervision, the aviator perfected a perfusion system to preserve organs outside the body. Both men believed that science would allow humanity to “create a race of giants who could leap 200 yards into the air and live forever.” They also believed that only the best and brightest should be allowed to reproduce, a view that prompted their disastrous foray into the realm of politics and social planning. Carrel later atoned for this hubris by going to the aid of Vichy France; Lindbergh recanted his belief in eugenics and embraced environmentalism.
A captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-052815-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
