An outstanding life of an impressive scientist.
A fine biography of perhaps the greatest astronomer of the past century that no one has heard of.
Journalist Moore’s subject is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), the eldest of three in a middle-class British family and clearly a prodigy, fascinated by natural history and science. Her father, who encouraged her pursuits, died when she was young, leaving the family short of money and with a mother of traditional, conservative views. As the author writes, she believed that “boys were to be educated, girls refined.” Despite favoring her son, she did not discourage Cecilia, who was lucky to encounter teachers who recognized her talents. Winning a scholarship, she studied physics at Cambridge until, inspired by a talk from the renowned Arthur Eddington, she changed to astronomy. She earned no degree because Cambridge did not give women degrees until 1948. Her teachers admitted that she had no future as an astronomer in Britain, so she went to Harvard to work under the charismatic Harlow Shapley, who was known for hiring women. Assigned to analyze the massive collection of photographic plates in observatory archives, Payne-Gaposchkin determined that helium was thousands of times more abundant and hydrogen millions of times more abundant in stars than on Earth. The discovery, presented in her 1925 doctoral thesis, was greeted skeptically but soon found to be correct. One scientist called it "the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy." Although Payne-Gaposchkin enjoyed an international reputation by the 1930s, Harvard’s catalog did not list her extremely popular classes until 1945. Appointed the first woman full professor in its faculty of arts and sciences in 1956, she became chair of the department of astronomy and died with many honors. Readers will gnash their teeth as Moore recounts the discrimination she endured. This annoyed Payne-Gaposchkin, but astronomy was her obsession, so she rarely made a fuss, and male astronomers, once they realized her brilliance, mostly treated her well.
An outstanding life of an impressive scientist.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-674-23737-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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