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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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