Reflects its subject’s passionate interests and makes scholarship positively sexy.
Another formidable, absorbing reading experience by versatile Winchester (A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, 2005, etc.), this one about the British scholar who made China’s contributions to civilization known in the West.
Displaying the author’s habitual ability to make any subject seem urgently momentous, this admiring biography of Joseph Needham (1900–95) will send many readers rushing off to read Needham’s magnum opus, Science and Civilization in China, which catalogued the ancient empire’s many inventions and discoveries in an ever-expanding series of volumes beginning in 1954. When the Cambridge biochemist first visited in 1943, most outsiders viewed civil-war-torn, Japanese-occupied China with what Winchester describes as “a mixture of disdain, contempt, and utter exasperation.” Invited on an official mission to bolster the beleaguered scientific community, Needham already had a very different attitude, fostered by his lover and fellow biochemist, Lu Gwei-djen. She had come to Cambridge from Nanjing in 1937, just after the Japanese invasion, and “in falling headlong for Gwei-djen, Needham found that he also became enraptured by her country.” She taught him to read, write and speak her language, which stood Needham in good stead during his three years traveling to some of the country’s remotest regions, reveling in such marvels as the man-made cave in the Turkestan desert where the world’s oldest printed book had been found in 1907. This adventurous period ended with his departure for England to help establish the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, intended to promote the kind of international cooperation in which he fervently believed. Cold War strictures soon led the staunchly socialist Needham to resign and return to Cambridge, where he devoted the next five decades to detailing China’s historic innovations (gunpowder, printing and the compass, to name a few) and asking why these astonishing accomplishments failed to develop a modern, industrial state.
Reflects its subject’s passionate interests and makes scholarship positively sexy.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-088459-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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