Conant deserves a place among the traditional “wise men” (Acheson, Harriman et al.), an elite group of white, male, East...
A biography of a “chemist, statesman, educator, and critic…[who] had within his grasp all the elements to help forge the new atomic age.”
James Conant (1893-1978) is only moderately well-known because, ironically, he accomplished not one but many things. He deserves better, and he receives it from his granddaughter, Jennet Conant (A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, 2011, etc.), a skilled historian. A quintessential New Englander (he possessed a “cold, clear-eyed Yankee pragmatism”) and superb student, Conant excelled in private school and at Harvard, where he received a doctorate in chemistry in 1916. He was an exceptional researcher, rising to become chairman of the chemistry department in 1931 and president of the university in 1933. He was a vigorous, controversial reformer, abolishing Latin requirements and athletic scholarships and allowing women to attend Harvard medical and law schools. Appointed head of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940, Conant spent the war administrating massive scientific programs, most importantly the Manhattan project. After 1945, he remained a top adviser. He declined the position of High Commissioner of Germany in 1951 but accepted in 1953 and became the first ambassador to West Germany. Conant was a brilliant chemist, an outstanding college president, a talented administrator, and an accomplished diplomat, but he was not charismatic, eccentric, or ahead of his time. Generally liberal, he had no objection to Harvard’s Jewish quota or firing teachers who invoked the Fifth Amendment. He is well-served by the 500 pages of his granddaughter’s intensely researched, insightful, and rarely dull biography.
Conant deserves a place among the traditional “wise men” (Acheson, Harriman et al.), an elite group of white, male, East Coast advisers, all pragmatic, realistic, and nonideological, who guided presidential policy from World War II through the end of the Cold War. This book gives him that place.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3088-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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