A sympathetic account of a brilliant but enigmatic giant of 20th-century science.
The nuclear physicist’s busy and not terribly melancholy life after his humiliating security-clearance hearing in 1954.
A national icon after World War II, extolled as father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer (1904–67) hobnobbed with world leaders and advised presidents. He also had plenty of enemies, who finally capitalized on his reluctance to develop the hydrogen bomb and enthusiastic participation in 1930s left-wing activities to organize the 1954 hearing that revoked his security clearance. Few historians deny that the hearing was wildly unfair or that he behaved with inexplicable passivity, which made the outcome inevitable. Science writer Wolverton (The Depths of Space, 2004, etc.) emphasizes that Oppenheimer loved being at the center of power, so this rebuff delivered a crushing blow, but it had no affect on his status as an internationally respected physicist or as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He continued to travel and write, and his lectures—on science or philosophy, never politics—attracted overflow audiences. Liberals and the liberal media supported him, but most Americans and the popular media looked on him as a suspicious character. Matters improved as anticommunist furor declined, particularly after Democrats won the 1960 election. By the ’60s many prominent officials supported restoring Oppenheimer’s security clearance, but this didn’t happen; he refused to submit to another hearing, and the administration was reluctant to risk another controversy. Wolverton makes a good case that Oppenheimer led a satisfying life until the end. He maintained an intense concern with scientific policy and preventing nuclear war, always enjoyed a respectful audience and remained an establishment spokesman, never a gadfly like Linus Pauling or Leo Szilard. He vehemently objected to artists and historians who portrayed him as a tragic figure tormented by remorse over his role in developing the bomb.
A sympathetic account of a brilliant but enigmatic giant of 20th-century science.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37440-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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