Certain to appeal to aspiring curators as well as anyone who has wondered what goes on behind the exhibitions.
An insider’s account of “what a natural history museum curator does.”
After more than 30 years as a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, one of the world’s largest natural history museums, Grande (The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time, 2013, etc.) steps back to describe the inner workings of these institutions devoted to the study of biology, anthropology, geology, and human culture. Drawing on his own life and career, he reveals the critical role of curators whose fieldwork advances scientific knowledge and makes possible the exhibitions so popular with the museumgoing public. As a working-class kid from the Minneapolis suburbs, Grande was smitten by natural history when he received a 52-million-year-old fossil fish as a gift. He earned a doctorate in evolutionary biology, joined the Field Museum in 1983, and has spent several weeks each summer for the past four decades engaged in fieldwork in the fossil-rich Wyoming desert that produced the prized fish of his youth. In this profusely illustrated book, he captures the excitement of scientific discovery and the “passion and competitive drive” of successful curators as they pursue wide-ranging research interests in caves, oceans, rain forests, and other locations around the world. His thumbnail accounts of colleagues’ work involving everything from mushrooms and ants to meteorites and ancient civilizations offer readers an opportunity to watch top curators in action. Grande also provides detailed accounts of controversies, such as the legal battle over the museum’s iconic T. rex skeleton named SUE; the long-standing tensions between academic and commercial fossil collectors; and his field’s “fierce debates” about systematic methods. A strong believer in the need to help nonscientists understand science, the author brings curatorial work to life through absorbing stories about fossils, gems, and other natural objects and the men and women who find them.
Certain to appeal to aspiring curators as well as anyone who has wondered what goes on behind the exhibitions.Pub Date: March 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-19275-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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