Two Moscow-based correspondents for the Cox Newspaper chain build a 50-year-old case against respected scientist Theodore Hall for having passed secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. A Harvard physics prodigy, Hall was just 18 when he was recruited in January 1944 to join hundreds of scientists at work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert. Even though Hall's left-wing leanings and sympathies for the Soviet Union were obvious, he had no trouble passing a security check. Hall was soon privy to the innermost secrets of America's frenzied rush to develop atomic weaponry. Albright and Kunstel allege that Hall passed some of these secrets to the Soviets, and that his information was more revealing of the bomb's design than that allegedly channeled through Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies in 1953. The journalists base their case largely on recently declassified documents from Russian and American intelligence archives, but also on interviews with Hall and his wife, Joan. Ted Hall, a researcher at Cambridge University for the last 30 years, never directly confesses, but he does admit that he was deeply concerned about the threat to humankind if America were to have a monopoly on atomic weapons, and that he was naive about Stalin's Soviet Union. The authors waver between exploring this rationale and exposing Hall as a spy as the book's central theme, and their focus is further diluted by myriad details about the atomic bomb project and Hall's alleged co-conspirators, and suggestions that there were yet other, even more important spies at Los Alamos. Though the context sometimes overwhelms the message, this largely sympathetic portrayal of a man who, like the Rosenbergs, would likely have been executed for his alleged crimes if he had been caught, is a revealing story about the times in which the Bomb was born. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8129-2861-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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