A thorough, glowing biography that sheds light on the achievements of an extraordinary scientist.
Valente details the life, struggles, and revolutionary research of Nobel Prize–winning Italian scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012).
Born in Turin to a prominent Jewish family, Levi-Montalcini began life as a painfully shy child in a stringently patriarchal society. She studied medicine at the University of Turin against her father’s wishes, under the tutelage of histologist Giuseppe Levi (no relation).She showed determination and skill as a neurobiology researcher, but her life was upended, like those of so many other Italian Jews, by the rise of fascism and World War II. As antisemitic laws banned Jewish people from nearly all aspects of public life and the Nazis occupied Northern Italy, Levi-Montalcini carried out her research precariously and in secret. Conducting experiments in a bedroom lab on chicken eggs, she began her study of a neuropeptide that would eventually be called nerve growth factor—the co-discovery of which won her a 1986 Nobel Prize. After the war, she accepted a research position at Washington University of St. Louis, eventually joining forces with biochemist Stanley Cohen. Together, they broke new ground regarding nerve growth factor, proving to the scientific community that the nervous system could be influenced by external factors. This discovery facilitated breakthroughs in developmental neurobiology and disease and wound treatments. Levi-Montalcini was also a lifelong advocate for women’s equality, education, human rights, and the use of science as a force for good. Over the course of this book, Valente’s prose can feel dry or clinical at times, particularly when it’s discussing scientific research: “Their main objective was to understand the role of the intrinsic, genetic factors vis-à-vis the extrinsic or environmental ones in the differentiation of the nervous centers.” However, the book’s style is otherwise straightforward, which makes it a good fit for young readers, and Levi-Montalcini’s remarkable life is nothing short of inspiring. Valente’s attention to detail and immense admiration for her subject shine through on every page of this work, which also includes such backmatter as Levi-Montalcini’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and an excerpt from her memoir.
A thorough, glowing biography that sheds light on the achievements of an extraordinary scientist.Pub Date: May 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-947431-36-2
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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