Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial...
Judicious biography of the Nazis’ chief rocket designer, who went on to lead the U.S. space program.
Son of a wealthy Prussian aristocrat, Werner Von Braun (1912–77) became fascinated with space travel during adolescence. His experiments with rockets while still an engineering student intrigued the German army, which hired him in 1932. Hitler’s 1933 accession opened the money floodgates, and Von Braun soon directed hundreds of workers in a top-secret complex. One result was the V-2, a dazzling achievement that killed thousands when launched against the Allies, in addition to the thousands of slave laborers who died while manufacturing the rocket under brutal conditions. Historian Neufeld (The Bombing of Auschwitz, 2000, etc.) agrees with critics who accuse Von Braun of complicity in Nazi crimes, noting that his obsession with space trumped any moral feelings. Brought to America with most of his team in 1945, the scientist energetically advocated space travel to a huge audience reached through books and a famous Colliers magazine series brought to television by Walt Disney. After the trauma of Sputnik’s launch in October 1957 and the embarrassing launch-pad explosion of the Vanguard TV-3 in December, Von Braun became a national hero and a media icon on January 31, 1958, when the first American satellite was successfully put into orbit. President Kennedy’s 1961 announcement of the Apollo program was the culmination of the scientist’s dreams. Despite receiving the lion’s share of publicity, his role was limited to designing the huge Saturn rocket, but this was the primary technological hurdle, and Saturn remains the only large booster that never failed. Neufeld stresses that Von Braun was less a brilliant innovator than a skilled leader of other brilliant men, much like the Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Densely packed with political and technical detail, but nonetheless engrossing: the defining work on a still-controversial figure.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26292-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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