A deftly balanced memoir, depicting both grand-scale breakthroughs, and one grateful citizen-scientist’s immersion in the...
An engaging if technically dense memoir by a pioneer of the nuclear age.
Seaborg (1912–99), whose final work was completed by his son, led a remarkable scientific life. A child of a first-generation Swedish immigrant family, he depicts an idyllic childhood in pre-boom California, darkened by the Depression. Fortunately, he was a quick study in the nascent field of atomic chemistry; at Berkeley in 1934, a series of fellowships saved him from abject poverty and he participated in the earliest advances in nuclear science with Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, who had just built the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory cyclotron. Despite the ominous implications of their work, Seaborg’s depiction of the 1930s scientific community is wholesome, centered on his courtship of his eventual wife and communal dining with future Nobel laureates. WWII transformed this insular universe: Seaborg’s scientific circle, including European refugees like Enrico Fermi, was rapidly absorbed by the Army’s top-secret “Manhattan Engineer District.” Depicting the war years, Seaborg recalls the era when Axis victory seemed possible, provoking an unprecedented collaboration between scientists and the military. He conveys the great scale of such projects as the Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos laboratories, all of which contributed to atomic arms development. Seaborg himself was in the vanguard in such dangerous realms as plutonium production (following his team’s virtual invention of it). He also details the convulsions of the Cold War, noting that he and his colleagues anticipated the arms race in 1945. While scientists like Oppenheimer renounced nuclear weaponry (and then stripped of their security clearances), the author’s career followed a more conservative course. He received the Nobel Prize in 1951, and was later recruited by President Kennedy to chair the Atomic Energy Commission, where his attempts to slow the US-Soviet buildup culminated in the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. He concludes with sober advocacy of nuclear power, noting with typical dryness, “The public tends to be illogical in evaluating risks.”
A deftly balanced memoir, depicting both grand-scale breakthroughs, and one grateful citizen-scientist’s immersion in the tumultuous postwar geopolitical landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-29991-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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