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
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
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