A well-written addition to the publisher’s “Eminent Lives” series.
Short biography of a giant in molecular biology.
English science writer Ridley (Nature Via Nurture, 2003, etc.) posits that Francis Crick (1916–2004) was one of the greats, on par with Einstein, Darwin and Galileo. That claim may surprise those familiar with him primarily as James Watson’s coauthor on the famous paper describing DNA’s double helix. But the author, who knew Crick, argues that his work to establish the precise correspondence between specific DNA bases and the proteins they encode is a discovery as crucial as gravity or evolution. Ridley traces Crick’s origins from a middle-class family of modest means. (His grandfather, an amateur naturalist, once exchanged letters with Darwin.) Trained as a physicist, Crick worked on defense projects involving mines and torpedoes during WWII and came out of the war with no clear direction. He decided to try biology, with a quixotic notion of finding the key to life. Landing a slot at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, he quickly established himself as a nonstop talker with an annoying laugh. Though a good theorist, he had problems with authority figures and was expected to leave once he finished his doctorate. Then Watson came to Cambridge; their joint assault on the structure of DNA is one of the best-known stories in modern science. Ridley covers the key details with keen insights into the pair’s relationship, then moves on to Crick’s role in solving the triplet code embedded in the DNA molecule. Nor does the text neglect his later work in both molecular biology and in attempting to solve the problem of consciousness. Crick comes across as a likable, highly motivated man without undue foibles; portraits of his coworkers and the period are also sharply drawn.
A well-written addition to the publisher’s “Eminent Lives” series.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-082333-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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