A good mix of the personal and the professional in a memoir suggesting that C.P. Snow’s two cultures occasionally meet...
Nobel Prize–winning biologist Varmus describes a varied, idiosyncratic career.
Medicine seemed an obvious career choice for the son of a physician, but he also loved literature; Amherst allowed him to do pre-med but also enjoy gifted English professors. After a restless year in Harvard’s graduate English department, he switched to medical school at Columbia. To avoid serving in the Vietnam War, which he strongly opposed, he applied for alternative duties at the National Institutes of Health. He worked in a lab that exposed him to virology and molecular hybridization, areas that proved crucial in his later studies of cancer genes. In short, fortuitous events, serendipity and sheer intellectual curiosity led to Varmus partnering with Michael Bishop (his co-Nobelist) at the University of California, San Francisco and their discovery that human cells contain proto-oncogenes, bits of DNA that if mutated can trigger malignancy. Details of the experiments with tumor viruses that led to their discoveries comprise the second of the memoir’s four parts. President Clinton appointed Varmus director of NIH in the mid-’90s, a time of growth for the federal research agency that nonetheless had its testy moments. The author was and is an outspoken lab scientist. He contended with turf battles among NIH institutes and sought greater control over NIH funding. He had to deal with issues such as embryonic stem cell research and reproductive cloning, as well as congressional oversight hearings, pressures to create new institutes and the demands of patient-advocacy groups. There were good times, of course, but after six years Varmus was ready to move on to a new job as president of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He has not endeared himself to science publishers by being an ardent advocate for free access to medical literature via the Internet, helping to launch a series of Public Library of Science journals available to anyone with a browser.
A good mix of the personal and the professional in a memoir suggesting that C.P. Snow’s two cultures occasionally meet within the same individual.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06128-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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