An encyclopedic examination of an extraordinary life in science. Freelance writer Hager wastes little time on Linus Pauling's Oregon boyhood, moving straight to his astonishingly precocious career in chemistry and a string of achievements that spanned more than seven decades and broke the boundaries between chemistry, physics, and medical research. Pauling was a brilliant theorist, hurling out an idea and throwing himself after it rather than building carefully collected data into a logical framework. He was usually right, most notably in his work with molecular structure and the nature of the chemical bond, for which he won his first Nobel Prize in 1954. But he was sometimes spectacularly wrong, falling victim to a characteristic combination of ``hurry and hubris,'' as when he lost the race to define the structure of DNA to comparative newcomers Watson and Crick. In middle age, Pauling's wife and his own restless intellect led him into political activism, and his tireless lobbying to ban nuclear testing and define the dangers of fallout attracted both the unwelcome attention of the House Un-American Affairs Committee and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963. Pauling lost much of his public support later in life, and most remember him for his stubborn insistence on the merits of vitamin C. Hager had Pauling's cooperation in his project, as did Ted and Ben Goertzel, another team of recent biographers (p. 1078), but the depth of Hager's work focuses a much stronger microscope on the intricacies of Pauling's life. But Hager defines himself up front as ``a Pauling enthusiast,'' and though he does not omit Pauling's less rational moments, the friendly portrait that emerges is one of a misunderstood hero whose most outrageous statements still contained a kernel of overlooked insight. A competent, exhaustive life of a complicated genius, and a reminder that the search for scientific truth is never unaffected by the personalities and politics of the searchers.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80909-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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