On the eve of WW II the physicist Lise Meitner, then living in Sweden, realized that the puzzling results reported to her by her colleagues in Berlin meant they had split the atom. Now Sime (Chemistry/Sacramento City College) tells the absorbing story of her life. Born in 1878, Meitner was a native of Vienna, enjoying the support of a loving family as she pursued not only a university education but a career in physics. As an adult Meitner converted from Judaism to Protestantism. She moved to Berlin and began doing research with the sufferance of the director of the chemistry institute: She could enter only through a side door to a basement room and was forced to use the toilet facilities of a restaurant down the street. Here began her close but curiously formal partnership with chemist Otto Hahn, later joined by Fritz Strassmann. For the technically minded, Sime provides the details of the painstaking experiments in which radioactive elements were bombarded with neutrons. In time, Meitner would gain the position and salary commensurate with her brilliance, as well as the recognition of Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Planck—anyone who was anybody in the pantheon of nuclear physics. But the '30s were to put an end to the collaboration, with the ever-increasing persecution of Jews (conversion did not count). Sime tells a suspenseful tale of Meitner's escape to Sweden, where she was given a place to work but essentially neither equipment nor staff to aid her. In the end it was Hahn and Strassmann who got the Nobel Prize- -Hahn providing a revisionist history which does him no credit. Meitner remained loyal, if disenchanted, for the rest of her life. She spent her last years in England, dying at 90. Her epitaph, chosen by her beloved nephew Otto Frisch, was: ``Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.'' It is precisely that combination that Sime captures in this scrupulously researched biography. (32 b&w photos, 10 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-520-08906-5
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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