Carl Sagan was without question the most famous scientist since Einstein. This biography tries to show why. Born to a Brooklyn Jewish family in 1934, Sagan showed an early interest in stars, dinosaurs, and large numbers: typical for a bright youngster. Later, he began to read science fiction, did experiments with a chemistry set, and dreamed of a career in astronomy. After persuading his parents he could make a living looking at stars, Sagan attended the University of Chicago. There he laid the foundations for the work for which he would become best known, acquiring influential mentors and writing a doctoral thesis with the unstated theme of life on other planets. Within a few years, he was among the leading experts on the subject, participating in the Green Bank conference where the modern SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) movement was born, and taking a position at Harvard. His 1966 translation/rewriting of a book by I. S. Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe, established him as a first-rate popularizer of science. That status didn—t win him friends in academia; in 1968 he was denied tenure at Harvard and moved to Cornell, where he became one of the stars of the faculty. From Ithaca, N.Y., he sallied forth to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, to SETI conferences, and to Hollywood, to film Cosmos, the TV series that made him a household name. He was a fixture with NASA, contributing ideas to several major space missions—including the placing of a recording on the Pioneer spacecraft featuring samples of Earth’s music. He was also a key figure in the “nuclear winter” controversy, arguing that the long-term effects of nuclear war could exterminate humanity. His incredibly active career left behind 25 books and approximately 300 scientific papers. Poundstone (Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1992, etc.) doesn—t whitewash Sagan’s personal flaws but leaves the reader with added appreciation of just how rich his legacy was—and what a loss his early death was to us. A readable and comprehensive life of a fascinating subject.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-5766-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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