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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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