The war on science is an old story. Pringle lends it specific weight with this chilling story of a man who, had he survived,...
A tragic story of the totalitarian suppression of knowledge—one that is all too familiar to history, even in our own time.
Pringle (Day of the Dandelion, 2007, etc.), former Moscow bureau chief for The Independent, recounts that in that city he lived on a street named for Lenin’s otherwise little-known brother. Down the way, on a grid named as a kind of “Who’s Who of the old USSR and its socialist allies, even Ho Chi Minh,” was Vavilov Street, named after the great physicist Sergei Vavilov, whose admitted brilliance was nothing compared to that of his brother Nikolai. A kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, Nikolai was always tearing off in search of rare einkorn or interesting hybrids. Pringle records a meeting of Vavilov and American botanist Luther Burbank, with the former concluding that “it was difficult to learn anything from Burbank—‘the artist’s intuition overwhelmed his research.’ ” When the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin, though despising the intelligentsia, recognized their at least temporary usefulness as technocrats in the new state, and Vavilov was allowed to continue his research in plant genetics and agronomy. Stalin was less kindly disposed toward the knowledge-working class, and he gave pride of place in the new Soviet science to the quack Trofim Lysenko, who dismissed Mendelian genetics in favor of a particularly ungainly kind of Lamarckism. Vavilov generously insisted that his scientific colleagues hear Lysenko out, even though “there was no proof of the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” as Lysenko insisted. Lysenko won out with his theories of vernalization; the result was a killing famine, one of several the Soviet Union endured. For his part, increasingly marginalized in a politicized scientific community, Vavilov wound up in the Gulag.
The war on science is an old story. Pringle lends it specific weight with this chilling story of a man who, had he survived, might have saved millions of lives.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6498-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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