A preposterous story kept in check by a restrained (if incredulous) voice and by situating it within the folderol of the...
A wildly improbable tale of a Boy Scout out to win a merit badge by building a leaky breeder reactor, told with steady grace and enveloping dread.
David Hahn was not like the other boys on his suburban Detroit block in the ’80s and early ’90s, writes L.A. Times reporter Silverstein (Private Warriors, 2000): his eccentricity was an obsession with chemistry. He had a great yearning for it, too, and a willingness to forge past the blasts and burns, a knack for obtaining radioactive materials, and a talent for pulling the wool over his parents’ eyes when he waded into dangerous waters. Silverstein explains that this wasn’t much of a stretch, as his parents were carrying around enough emotional baggage to make Hahn look like a Boy Scout, which, indeed, he was. Silverstein beguilingly stirs a witch’s brew of elements into a boy with a mission: There was the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, with its amazing obliviousness to the volatility of its information; there were the Boy Scout and Department of Energy’s propaganda handouts on nuclear energy, which allowed Hahn to rest “comfortably cocooned within the confident optimism of the 1950s and 1960s”; there was the sense of control and predictability in chemistry that was so absent in his home life, and the pleasures of notoriety and attention, so absent from his social life, that his chemistry mishaps brought him. As the story creeps along, inevitably toward the reactor craziness, Silverstein fills in background information from a helpful introduction to the necessary chemistry and nuclear physics to an unclouded look at the history of the atomic energy military/industrial complex in the US. Hahn got the reactor running, then hot, too hot, and it would have been funny if it hadn’t endangered 40,000 people.
A preposterous story kept in check by a restrained (if incredulous) voice and by situating it within the folderol of the Cold War nuclear fraternity.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50351-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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