This book’s complexity may drive some readers away, but its “in the trenches” view of science and academia should be...
A debut memoir recounts the experiences, conclusions, opinions, and connections the author developed during the time she spent pursuing a career in the sciences.
Despite a few detours along the way, Gerstell found scientific study dominating much of her life, beginning in her early days. Exploring her own mathematical sequences helped mitigate boredom during grade school. In addition, numerous family members in various STEM fields, including an uncle who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer, were around to offer stories, expectations, and inspiration. She would earn two degrees through Harvard, eventually doing postgraduate work at Caltech well into middle age, where she earned her Ph.D. in planetary sciences. Through her researching and teaching the “big ideas” that many laypeople look on in awe of, ranging from avalanches on Mars to life on other planets, the author highlights the grunt work behind these endeavors, revealing the tedium of proofreading, mechanical data collection, and the unsatisfying notion that sometimes progress is showing what doesn’t work. Gerstell’s (The Trigonometric Travelogue, 1987) memoir is difficult to approach for those with little knowledge of mathematics or science. Much of the book relies on name-dropping scientific “somebodies” while checking off the “nobodies,” though the differences between the two will likely leave less-informed readers scratching their heads. A concise and useful index and appendix, as well as adequate citations, offset some of this, but a little more information on the why of these individuals’ stardom (or lack thereof) would ease some confusion. Gerstell’s time in STEM is explored in a nonlinear fashion, often utilizing short asides to address some intriguing inequities in the field. Anecdotal stories about African-American scientists unwilling to put their names on more outlandish theories and a look at why astronaut Sally Ride is thought of as a scientific superstar while astronaut Judith Resnik goes largely unremembered bring up invaluable points about the roles race, anti-Semitism, and even gender play in the sciences. Furthermore, it is chilling to see how many areas of study die due to nothing more than a lack of funding, while conclusions with solid backings, such as climate change, are forced into greater, unnecessary expenditures because of politics.
This book’s complexity may drive some readers away, but its “in the trenches” view of science and academia should be examined.Pub Date: March 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5236-7117-5
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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