A sympathetic tribute to a brilliant physicist who gave up research to inspire a love for science in laymen.
An admiring biography of Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985) by a friend and colleague, science writer Cole (Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos, 2003, etc.).
Eight years younger than his brother J. Robert, the father of the atomic bomb, Frank was also a physicist but differed in having a common touch, a cheerful, outgoing personality and, unlike his theoretician brother, great mechanical skills. He helped develop the cyclotron and participated in the Manhattan project. Like Robert, he sympathized with communist causes during the 1930s and suffered for it during the McCarthy era, when the University of Minnesota forced him to resign in 1949 and no other university would hire him. Taking his family to rural Colorado, he spent ten years raising cattle but also revealed a genius for teaching. By the late ’50s, students at his obscure high school regularly won the state science fair. As his reputation spread, he began holding classes for teachers and finally rejoined academia at the University of Colorado in 1961. Oppenheimer soon discovered that teaching science fascinated him more than the new, high-pressure world of postwar physics. In 1967 he moved to San Francisco to put his ideas into practice. Employing boundless energy and charm and influential friends, he established the Exploratorium, whose imaginative approach has transformed museums around the world. Science and cold-war politics occupy less than half the book, which emphasizes the struggle to build the museum and keep it running while hewing to Oppenheimer’s goal of combining art and science in ingenious, often hands-on exhibits.
A sympathetic tribute to a brilliant physicist who gave up research to inspire a love for science in laymen.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-100822-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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