A fine biography of a man who played an essential role in post–World War II American science and deserves to be better known.
The life and work of “an expert in technology” who is largely forgotten outside the world of physics.
Richard Garwin (b. 1928) was Enrico Fermi’s favorite student, and he worked with theoretical physicist Edward Teller and played a central role in developing the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos. A brilliant experimenter and inventor, he made important contributions to physics but never won a Nobel Prize or created controversy, so few beyond the scientific community have honored him. Science writer Shurkin (Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age, 2006, etc.) will probably not change matters, but readers will enjoy his compelling biography of an extraordinarily talented scientist. A prodigy from childhood, Garwin was a 23-year-old with a doctorate when, assigned by Teller, he designed the first workable model for a fusion device. Teller spent his life in a successful battle to take credit for the H-bomb; consequently, except among colleagues, Garwin’s work was unknown. In his definitive account of the H-bomb, Dark Sun (1995), Richard Rhodes “missed it because no one told him about it.” Even Shurkin, a skilled writer, strains to explain Garwin’s promotion of the mathematical algorithm called the Fast Fourier Transform, now “a common tool in virtually every aspect of science and technology.” Readers will have no trouble recognizing the laser printer, GPS, touch screen, and virtual reality helmet, developed during Garwin’s long career at IBM (the latter two were rejected by superiors but smash hits for rival companies a generation later). By the 1960s, he was a valued science consultant to presidents, regularly telling them what they didn’t want to hear and, despite his H-bomb history, working to promote disarmament.
A fine biography of a man who played an essential role in post–World War II American science and deserves to be better known.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63388-223-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
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