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 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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