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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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