A fascinating picture of a scientist whose distinguished career deserves to be better known.
The awe-inspiring aurora borealis was, appropriately, first explained by a Norwegian scientist, whose story Jago sets forth.
Jago, a London-based TV journalist, begins by showing Kristian Birkeland (1868–1917) on his first Arctic expedition, in 1899, to Finnmark in the far north of Norway. At 31, Birkeland had shown unusual aptitude at science and only a year before had become a professor of physics at Norway’s only university. More accustomed to the laboratory than to the demanding Arctic weather he and his assistants were about to face, Birkeland had a theory that the aurora was caused by solar particles entering Earth’s magnetic field. After an incredibly harsh winter featuring high winds that nearly destroyed the scientists’ rude shelter and an avalanche that killed one of his assistants, Birkeland had his data. But time to analyze and publish the results was hard to come by, and the expedition had already wildly exceeded its budget. To free himself from the demands of teaching, Birkeland began to search for some patentable process to provide cash that would support full-time research. After several time-consuming projects, he perfected a method for extracting atmospheric nitrogen, in demand as the basis for synthetic fertilizers. Meanwhile, his explanation of the aurora (bolstered by some fascinating laboratory work) fell flat because he still could not explain how solar particles reached Earth. Nationalist rivalries in the pre–WWI era further undermined Birkeland’s ability to make his mark: A staunch Norwegian patriot, he faced condescension from the then-dominant German and British scientific establishments. His frustrating final days were spent in exile in Egypt, then in Japan, where he died, his theories still rejected—although they are now considered proven.
A fascinating picture of a scientist whose distinguished career deserves to be better known.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40980-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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 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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