A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.
Biologist Brookes (Fly, 2001, etc.) pens a popular life of Darwin’s cousin, the inventor of eugenics.
The youngest child of a Quaker banker, and the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, Francis Galton (1822–1911) came from a family with strong claims to scientific eminence. At age four, he could read anything in English, knew the rudiments of Latin and French, and had made a solid start on mathematics. At his father’s urging he began medical studies before entering Cambridge to read mathematics. Independently wealthy after his father’s death, he mounted an expedition into southwest Africa, exploring hostile desert country without a single life lost. He returned home to honors from the Royal Geographic Society, wrote the bestselling Art of Travel, and married Louisa Butler, daughter of an eminent intellectual family. Now his long interest in mathematics and statistics re-emerged. He invented the weather map as we know it today and discovered the anti-cyclone weather pattern. Darwin’s Origin of Species convinced him that the human race might be improved in the same way as breeds of domestic animals, by encouraging only the best specimens to breed. The author shows how Galton’s idée fixe, despite initial resistance from his scientific peers, became by the end of his life a widely accepted scheme for the betterment of society. Galton’s own snobbism, along with the racism and chauvinism of his era, was undoubtedly a major ingredient in his advocacy of eugenics, which came to serve as justification for unspeakable evils. At the same time, Brookes points out, his focus on genetic determinism laid the ground for the modern science of genetics, which may eventually have a greater positive impact on the world than anything Galton claimed eugenics could achieve.
A clear-eyed look at a fascinating man who left an unmistakable—if mixed—stamp upon the world we live in.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-481-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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