The answer is ``yes,'' says Drake (Astronomy/UC at Santa Cruz), founder of the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), in this likable autobiography told with the assistance of Sobel, former science editor for The New York Times. Drake, who was born in 1930, describes how adolescent rebellion against religion drove him to science, where he developed an early fascination with life in outer space. At Harvard, he became a radio astronomer, and realized that this fledgling science would allow him to scan the heavens for extraterrestrials. At 26, he thought he heard their signals: ``I could barely breathe from excitement, and soon after my hair started to turn white.'' Despite this false alarm, in 1960 he started Project Ozma, the first serious SETI endeavor, and soon after joined forces with young Carl Sagan, dolphin expert John Lilly, and others in a professional SETI study group known as ``The Order of the Dolphin.'' Drake became director of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, where he encountered terrorists and vampire bats; coined the term ``pulsars''; and, with Sagan, visited an incarcerated Timothy Leary, who requested help in designing spacecraft. In time, bigger and better SETIs ensued, including the infamous plaque of a nude man and woman aboard Pioneer 10, for which Drake incurred the wrath of American prudes and the British Astronomer Royal, who feared that our location had been divulged to bloodthirsty aliens. In Drake's view, the culmination of SETI is the upcoming NASA project to eavesdrop on 28 million radio channels simultaneously. His enthusiasm is infectious as he predicts the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence by the year 2000, which ``will profoundly change the world.'' Since SETI has shown only negative results after 30 years, this serves as testimony to both scientific pluck and eternal optimism. A fascinating life, rich with odd opinions (``I suspect that immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials'') and a sense of cosmic awe. (Line art and photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-30532-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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 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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