A touching, three-dimensional portrait of the Polish-born scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner. Armed with new archival material, including eloquent letters Marie Curie (18671934) wrote to her husband, Pierre, after his death, Quinn (A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, not reviewed) focuses less on the discoveries of radium and radioactivity and more on the personality that stamped Curie as a woman both of and ahead of her time. Here is Maria Sklowdoska, a fierce nationalist growing up under the heel of the Russian occupation of Poland, encouraged to independence and defiance in schools that taught two curricula: One was the official Russian; the other, hidden, was Polish language and history. Then there is Marie, a student in Paris, who chooses physics, mathematics, and Pierre. Idylls bicycling by the sea and in the countryside, the birth of two daughters, and the first Nobel Prize give way to the untimely death in 1906 of Pierre, crushed under the wheels of a wagon on a Paris street. Marie took his place as lecturer at the Sorbonne, yet could scarcely bear to mention his name in public. But there was to be a second love: the physicist Paul Langevin, a devoted student of Pierre's—and a married father of four. Langevin's wife used every weapon, including threats of murder and the publishing of purloined love letters, to save her marriage. She won, turning the world against Curie. In time, the storm passed, Curie's fame was secure, and she presided over a large laboratory and staff, living to see daughter Iräne and her husband, FrÇdÇric Joliot, emerge as scientific standard-bearers in a proud family tradition. Quinn's study makes it clear that Curie's twin passions—for life and for science—sustained her thorough formidable personal tragedies and public catastrophes. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-67542-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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