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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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