An important story well-told.
A chronicle of the friendship between writer Albert Camus and biologist Jacques Monod, skillfully combining science, biography and history.
They first came together in September 1948 to cooperate in a venture against international communism known as Groupes de Liaison Internationale, writes Carroll (Molecular Biology and Genetics/Univ. of Wisconsin; Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for Origins of Species, 2009, etc.). As the anonymous editor and lead writer of the underground resistance newspaper Combat, Camus had provided a voice for his fellow countrymen during the war and immediately after. Monod, a bitter opponent of what he called the Soviet Union's “insane phenomenon,” including Trofim Lysenko's genetic theories, attended meetings and contributed science writing to Combat. Their common effort involved a confrontation with friends and allies from past struggles against the Nazis, such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Carroll shows that through this cooperation, Camus and Monod began to understand that shared philosophical and political convictions had fueled their earlier, separate contributions to the Resistance. In those years, while Camus edited, Monod had been involved in clandestine military operations, securing weapons and ammunition, planning sabotage, coordinating with Americans in Switzerland and organizing the civilian uprising that helped liberate Paris. Their postwar cooperation was much broader than simple anticommunism. Nobel Prizes crowned the careers of both. In 1957, Camus became the second-youngest winner of the literature prize at age 44, primarily for his philosophical treatise The Rebel. Monod was awarded his prize in 1965 for discoveries concerning “the genetic control of enzyme and viral synthesis,” but Camus, tragically killed in an auto accident in 1960, did not live to see that day. Monod carried on Camus' work through his own later writings and such activities as welcoming Martin Luther King to Paris.
An important story well-told.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95233-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
