A portrait that captures not only the man, but also the end-of-the-19th-century dynamism that fostered revolutions in art,...
A resurrection of the life of “one of the founding fathers of immunology,” Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916).
Vikhanski (In Search of the Lost Cord: Solving the Mystery of Spinal Cord Regeneration, 2001, etc.), a Russian-born, Israel-based science journalist, was initially dismissive of the achievements of the Ukrainian-born scientist, depicted as a great Russian hero in her school texts, a depiction she thought was merely Soviet propaganda. What she discovered sheds light on a critical period in medical and cultural history. Germ theory advanced greatly under Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, and vaccines and serum treatments were developed to prevent or cure disease. Yet next to nothing was known about the body’s natural defenses. Enter Metchnikoff, a zoologist and fervent Darwinian who believed the study of simple organisms could reveal protective mechanisms that would be preserved in higher forms of life. His great epiphany occurred when he used rose thorns to invade the body of a transparent marine organism and, under the microscope, saw the mobilization of cells that engulfed and chewed up the thorns. He called them phagocytes (cell-eaters) and declared them the body’s chief defenders. Meanwhile, scientists in Germany had discovered antibodies. The resulting “Immunity War” pitted French scientists at the Pasteur Institute (where Metchnikoff settled for the remainder of his career) against the Germans. Eventually, the war waned, and Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize. Only much later did scientists realize that Metchnikoff’s phagocytes reflected “innate immunity,” an evolutionarily older defense system compared to the “adaptive immunity” represented by antibodies. Metchnikoff went on to develop theories of aging and ideas about gut microbes that spawned a global yogurt revolution. As Vikhanski richly illustrates, Metchnikoff did everything with passion, in both his professional and personal lives.
A portrait that captures not only the man, but also the end-of-the-19th-century dynamism that fostered revolutions in art, politics, and science.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-110-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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