A veteran of the Smithsonian's oral-history program on the Manhattan Project, Szanton brings an educated focus and a writer's sensitivity to these expertly shaped memoirs, based on over 30 interviews, of a Hungarian-born Nobelist who helped create the atomic bomb. Born in 1902 as a middle-class product of Budapest's excellent private schools (along with Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Leo Szilard, the three other Hungarian ``geniuses'' behind the Manhattan Project), Wigner graduated to a lectureship at Princeton in 1930. It was from this position of relative safety that he watched, horrified, as Hitler rose to power. Convinced that the Nazis would soon develop an atomic bomb, Wigner solicited and translated Einstein's renowned letter to FDR warning of the potential danger of atomic weapons; urged US military leaders to fund fission research; and joined the Metallurgical Laboratory at the Univ. of Chicago in time to witness the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Though acknowledging here that ``we should have known that Hitler would not build an atomic bomb,'' and in spite of his regret about Hiroshima, Wigner claims to wish only that US nuclear capability had been achieved earlier, in time to prevent Soviet expansion. His terror of dictatorships, he says, contributed to his belief in the ``foolishness'' of mutual assured destruction; his outrage at the ``sick'' opinions of rebellious American youth in the 1960's; his continuing support for active US preparation for nuclear attack; and his attendance at scientific conferences sponsored by the vehemently anti-Communist Unification Church. Though he reviles his ``best friend'' Leo Szilard as a ``staunch leftist,'' Wigner refuses to condemn Werner Heisenberg for his work with the Nazis. The nature of these memoirs, in which the interviewer remains virtually invisible, precludes any challenge to such apparent contradictions—a disappointment in an otherwise intriguing self-portrait. (Twenty-one b&w photographs— not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-306-44326-0
Page Count: 310
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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