Scoles has done her homework, so readers will both understand and sympathize with Tarter, who has become an icon and role...
The inspiring story of an important American astronomer who co-founded the SETI Institute, which was created “to study all aspects of the existence, formation, and evolution of life in the universe.
Reputable astronomers and other scientists have searched for extraterrestrial transmissions since the 1960s. Educated readers might name Carl Sagan as the lead figure, but that role belongs to Jill Tarter (b. 1944), an impressive pioneer who receives an admiring, insightful biography by Scoles, a former editor of Astronomy magazine who worked at the observatory where the first SETI project was implemented. “If there’s just us, that seems an awful waste of space,” is a line from the 1997 film Contact, delivered by Jodie Foster, a character partly based on Tarter, and both the real and fictional astronomer remain an inspiration to women entering science. The sole woman among 300 in her undergraduate class, Tarter did significant work in astronomy before becoming fascinated with stellar radio emissions that might indicate intelligent life. Although not the first, her persistence, imagination, and charisma have made her an iconic figure in the search for extraterrestrial life. Plucking an alien transmission from the avalanche of human and natural radio emissions is technically demanding, requiring sophisticated engineering. NASA provided modest support until Congress killed it. The Air Force pays to use its detectors, but fundraising preoccupies SETI leaders, Tarter included. When she began, scientists knew only one solar system and considered life a delicate phenomenon. Now we know that our galaxy contains 100 billion planets, and plenty of earthly organisms (“extremophiles”) live in ice, boiling water, miles under the earth or sea, and amid toxic chemicals and radiation. Astrobiology has become a highly respected profession.
Scoles has done her homework, so readers will both understand and sympathize with Tarter, who has become an icon and role model despite pursuing a goal she knows she will never achieve.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-441-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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