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 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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