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
A gargantuan but surprisingly agile and spellbinding biography of the plain-speaking, plain-dealing Man from Missouri. As depicted by McCullough (Brave Companions, 1991, etc.), Truman, though the first President of the nuclear era, was fundamentally a throwback to 19th-century midwestern ideals of honesty. Like the young Teddy Roosevelt in the author's Mornings on Horseback (1981), the pre-Presidential Truman most impresses McCullough as a battler against overwhelming odds: the failed farmer and haberdasher; the WW I captain who kept his unit together under deadly fire; and the scorned product of the Kansas City machine who won Senate colleagues' respect by chairing an investigation into WW II defense spending and winning a ferocious primary contest. With the stage thus set, the narrative picks up whirlwind force, following Truman from his assumption of the Presidency upon FDR's death—when "the sun, the moon, and the stars" seemed ready to fall on him—through the decisions to drop the atomic bomb; confront Stalin at Potsdam; send troops to Korea (the most important decision of his Presidency, Truman felt); and fire MacArthur. The book's main event, however, is the legendary "Whistle-Stop Campaign" of 1948, when Truman puffed off the political upset of the century. Readers jaded by Vietnam and Watergate may ask: Could any President be this serene, honest, and courageous? Yet McCullough weaves his spell, convincingly limning a politician who didn't lie, steal, pay attention to pollsters or pundits, or quail in the face of diplomatic or political combat (his major fault seems to have been excessive loyalty to cronies who betrayed his trust). Truman apparently really was, as his Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, the "captain with the mighty heart." Rich in detail, enthralling, and moving: a classic Presidential biography.
Pub Date: June 19, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-45654-7
Page Count: 1120
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
IN THE NEWS
These subtle, reflective observations offer delightful insights into the lighthouse mystique.
A writer muses on what lighthouses mean to her.
Barrera, a Mexican journalist and editor and co-founder of the Mexico City–based publisher Ediciones Antilope, confesses early on that she’s a collector. “Collecting is a form of escapism,” she writes. After visiting Yaquina Head Lighthouse on the Oregon coast, she wanted “to articulate my feelings about that panorama—the moment and the lighthouse.” There was “something in the lighthouse itself that intrigued me.” Following that trip, she visited a few others and conducted research into their histories and the stories surrounding them: “It was like falling in love; I wanted to know the lighthouse to its very core.” Each story includes a wide array of topics in lighthouse culture, including literature, history, science, art, music, and the daily, brutal lives of the isolated keepers and their families. “From afar, a lighthouse is a ghost, or rather a myth, a symbol,” writes the author. “At close quarters, it is a beautiful building.” Barrera gives close attention to Robert Louis Stevenson’s family: his father, Thomas, instrumental in developing the revolutionary lens that replaced kerosene lamps, and his grandfather, Robert, the first to “construct a lighthouse on a marine rock, far from the coast.” The author is also intrigued that Edgar Allan Poe’s last, unfinished story was about a lighthouse keeper. Barrera chronicles her visit to the Ghoury Lighthouse, built in 1823 after a boat shipwrecked off the Normandy coast, and she comments on the many lighthouses in Edward Hopper’s paintings; he “said that the lighthouse is a solitary individual who stoically confronts the onrush of industrial society.” The author bemoans the fact that GPS and computers may one day make them obsolete. After reading Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, about an orphaned boy who works in a signal station, Barrera stopped writing. “There are collections that will always be incomplete, and sometimes it’s better not to continue them.”
These subtle, reflective observations offer delightful insights into the lighthouse mystique.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949641-01-1
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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