Borrowing the techniques of an accomplished novelist for biographical purposes, Shipman brings to vivid life a character...
An imaginative life of the controversial Dutch scientist (1858–1940) who discovered the first specimen of Homo erectus in Java in 1891.
Award-winning science writer Shipman (Taking Wing, 1998, etc.) has created an intimate, utterly convincing portrait of the long-misunderstood scientist who from his youth was obsessed with the notion of discovering the “missing link.” Employing the present tense throughout, Shipman (Anthropology/Pennsylvania State Univ.) achieves an immediacy that propels her text to its sobering conclusion, in which the aged, lonely scientist intransigently insists on his theories as anthropological research (many of whose techniques he pioneered) passes him by. The story begins in February 1937 when Dubois, living in virtual seclusion, receives a letter from a dear friend he has not seen in many years. The letter stimulates memories and sets off a lengthy flashback. During his youth in Holland, Dubois’s conventional, firmly Catholic family could not appreciate the genius of young Eugène, who even in boyhood maintained a strict schedule of study. He later married and was in the midst of a successful academic career in anatomy when discoveries of Neanderthal remains rekindled his youthful interest in human evolution. He joined the Dutch military as a physician and headed with his young family to Sumatra, then Java, where he eventually pursued his passion for fossil hunting full-time. Dubois mercilessly drove himself and his helpers, but eventually his persistence rewarded him with a skullcap, femur, and teeth from a specimen he believed belonged to the species he had sought so long. He spent much of the rest of his life struggling to convince his skeptical colleagues. Shipman invents many of Dubois’s conversations, emotions, and thoughts, but they all rest on her comprehensive, meticulous research.
Borrowing the techniques of an accomplished novelist for biographical purposes, Shipman brings to vivid life a character whose scientific work rivaled Galileo’s in its drama. (53 b&w illustrations, 7 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85581-X
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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