Though burdened with unnecessary data (on, for instance, the distribution of Groves’s West Point classmates through various...
An overly detailed but useful biography of an unacknowledged founding father of the nuclear era.
Leslie Groves, a spit-and-polish West Pointer with a zeal for efficiency and secrecy, was just the right choice to head the Manhattan Project, to judge by Norris’s (Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, not reviewed) account. Having been one of the lead engineers responsible for building the Pentagon, he knew all about marshalling vast resources and conflicting personalities, capabilities of which national security advisor Vannevar Bush was well aware when he convinced Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Groves to lead the then–most secretive project the government had ever undertaken. Bush explained, “there ought to be one officer, of fine technical qualifications, assigned to become utterly familiar with this whole matter,” but, writes Norris, the reason for putting an Army Corps of Engineers officer in charge of the Manhattan Project “was to hide the expenditures for the project within the corps’ massive budget.” As commander, Norris writes, Groves shared responsibility for the use of the atomic bomb on civilian targets in Japan, about which Groves had no qualms; adds Norris, that use was not a matter of if, but of when—a foregone conclusion once development of the atomic bomb began. Moreover, Groves set in place procedures designed to ensure secrecy and compartmentalize knowledge, so that one Los Alamos worker never quite knew what another was up to (procedures that current Los Alamos administrators might do well to adapt, given recent scandals there). Whatever his accomplishments, Groves was a martinet, as Norris shows; he managed to offend most of the scientists, officers, and politicians with whom he came into contact, and he ended his days as a right-wing ideologue convinced that the government was full of “deep-dyed Reds,” “pink Reds,” and “little shades of pink.”
Though burdened with unnecessary data (on, for instance, the distribution of Groves’s West Point classmates through various corps of the Army), Norris’s narrative is of much use to students of the atomic age.Pub Date: April 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58642-039-9
Page Count: 727
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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