A well-written addition to the publisher’s “Eminent Lives” series.
Short biography of a giant in molecular biology.
English science writer Ridley (Nature Via Nurture, 2003, etc.) posits that Francis Crick (1916–2004) was one of the greats, on par with Einstein, Darwin and Galileo. That claim may surprise those familiar with him primarily as James Watson’s coauthor on the famous paper describing DNA’s double helix. But the author, who knew Crick, argues that his work to establish the precise correspondence between specific DNA bases and the proteins they encode is a discovery as crucial as gravity or evolution. Ridley traces Crick’s origins from a middle-class family of modest means. (His grandfather, an amateur naturalist, once exchanged letters with Darwin.) Trained as a physicist, Crick worked on defense projects involving mines and torpedoes during WWII and came out of the war with no clear direction. He decided to try biology, with a quixotic notion of finding the key to life. Landing a slot at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, he quickly established himself as a nonstop talker with an annoying laugh. Though a good theorist, he had problems with authority figures and was expected to leave once he finished his doctorate. Then Watson came to Cambridge; their joint assault on the structure of DNA is one of the best-known stories in modern science. Ridley covers the key details with keen insights into the pair’s relationship, then moves on to Crick’s role in solving the triplet code embedded in the DNA molecule. Nor does the text neglect his later work in both molecular biology and in attempting to solve the problem of consciousness. Crick comes across as a likable, highly motivated man without undue foibles; portraits of his coworkers and the period are also sharply drawn.
A well-written addition to the publisher’s “Eminent Lives” series.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-082333-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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