A fine tribute to a forerunner of today’s personalized medicine and wellness monitoring; Hood deserves to be a household...
A debut biography examines a biologist whose DNA sequencing work paved the way for the Human Genome Project.
Biotech journalist Timmerman met Leroy “Lee” Edward Hood as a Seattle Times reporter in 2001. Bill Gates had lured Hood to the University of Washington in 1991 with $12 million for a molecular biotechnology department, but in 1999 Hood resigned to found the Institute for Systems Biology. The book shrewdly opens with this turning point, then retreats to Hood’s birth in Montana in 1938 and proceeds chronologically. A football quarterback and Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist, Hood looked to professors to provide the positive example his alcoholic father didn’t. Caltech hosted much of Hood’s career, from undergraduate years—when he was president of the freshman class—to two decades on staff. While at Caltech, he co-wrote a biochemistry textbook and headed a cancer research center. “Never prone to self-doubt,” Hood had broad but shallow knowledge, Timmerman notes, so relied on—and sometimes took credit for—colleagues’ expertise. However, he was dedicated to innovation, and his work on a DNA sequencing machine would prove as revolutionary to the genomics field as the printing press has been in Western culture. Such farsightedness accounts for him winning the 2002 Kyoto Prize and a 2013 National Medal of Science—limited consolation for missing out on a Nobel Prize in the 1980s. One chapter title sums Hood up perfectly: “A Visionary, Not a Manager.” Timmerman builds a painstaking picture of a determined researcher whose entrepreneurial spirit made up for what he lacked in genius and interpersonal skills. Although distant and dismissive of bureaucracy, Hood earned tenure at Caltech at age 35 and became a department chair at 41—but he was asked to step down in 1988. Alongside his professional difficulties, including some failed ventures (for example, a rice genome project with Monsanto), were complications in his personal life, particularly wife Valerie Logan’s Alzheimer’s disease. In this sympathetic and thorough biography, Timmerman’s admiration of a man who was still working 84-hour weeks well into his 70s comes through clearly. Yet the author never shies away from the contradictions of this forceful personality.
A fine tribute to a forerunner of today’s personalized medicine and wellness monitoring; Hood deserves to be a household name.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977093-0-8
Page Count: 438
Publisher: Bandera Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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