Another bio of the flamboyant astronomer and creator of Cosmos (see William Poundstone, p. 1391), from a veteran science writer (coauthor with George Smoot of Wrinkles in Time, 1993). Davidson credits Sagan’s influential Intelligent Life in the Universe, a collaboration with Russian astronomer I.S. Shklovskii, with awakening his own interest in science. He recognizes Sagan as a great popularizer, one of the preeminent translators of scientific ideas into the vernacular of his day. At the same time, he clearly distrusts the myth that Sagan often seemed to personify, that of the scientist as a sort of modern high priest, omniscient and above the fray. In this spirit, the biography often seems to be recounting Sagan’s career with an eye to undercutting that myth, if not necessarily the man himself. Thus the digs at Big Science, where political acumen counts for as much as research ability; the quotation of derogatory remarks from Sagan’s former friends (e.g., Harold Blum, who called his prose style “phony”); and hints that there were deep-seated irrational elements behind the cool surface of Sagan’s science. Sagan was clearly a man who made enemies as easily as friends, and Davidson has sought out both camps. The resulting portrait is not so much a debunking of Sagan, however, as a highlighting of certain qualities that might have increased his popular appeal. The “nuclear winter” episode, in which Sagan and several colleagues argued that even a “limited” nuclear war might lead to the extermination of human life, showed Sagan as an eminent scientific expert, paradoxically arguing that the issues involved were too important to leave to the experts. Likewise, in many ways Sagan’s constant advocacy of the search for life beyond Earth—the central science-fictional dream—was a key to the space program’s becoming hard reality. In the end, Davidson argues, Sagan’s influence in such matters may count for more than any of his books. A smoothly written, sometimes critical look at a leading scientific figure of our time.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-471-25286-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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