Disproving Vannevar Bush's claim that any biography of him would be terrible, Zachary (Show-Stopper!, 1994), a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, deftly follows the life and career of the single most important scientist working for the US during WW II. Zachary relies heavily on Bush's writings as well as on interviews with coworkers and family to construct a portrait of the genius who helped create the military-industrial complex when he served as director of the Office of Scientific research and Development during the war. From Tufts University, where as a student Bush registered his first patent, to Los Alamos and the explosion of the first atomic bomb—a project with which he was intimately involved—Zachary offers a vivid portrait of his subject, warts and all. Given that Bush was arrogantly technocratic (he even questioned whether a postWW II America could still function as a democracy), Zachary wisely takes a coldly objective point of view. This is not to say that Zachary's portrait of Bush dehumanizes the man. Such details as his apparently chronic nightmares as a result of having engineered the carpet bombings of Germany and Japan, his struggles with failing health and loneliness late in life, and his growing belief that the Allies had won the war but lost the peace, are all noted here. Clearly, Zachary sees Bush's defense of Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy-era investigation of the Manhattan Project's principal scientist as his most noble moment. Even under the liberal administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, Bush was revered as an American institution but kept at a safe distance from the White House in a not-always- successful attempt to avoid the controversy that inevitably followed the iconoclastic scientist. Of particular interest to today's technocrat will be Zachary's discussion of how Bush's memex and rapid selector inventions prefigured today's Internet. Bush remains, as this biography demonstrates, a complex, deeply controversial, and profoundly influential figure.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82821-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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