An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose.
A tale of the resurrection of the woolly mammoth and how “biology and genetics [have] gone from passive observation to active creation.”
Bestselling author Mezrich (Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs, 2016, etc.) is a fine storyteller who likes offbeat topics. Film producers snap up his books (The Social Network, 21), including this one. The author describes this one as a “dramatic narrative account,” and he opens with something out of a Michael Crichton novel: 3,000 years ago, a 200-pound mammoth calf is born, and he’s “the last of his kind.” Fast-forward to today, where we meet Dr. George Church—“fast becoming the face of the genetic revolution”—in his lab at Harvard Medical School. This is his story as well as the story of the many graduate students working with him on genetic engineering. Their goal is to genetically engineer synthetically sequenced woolly mammoth genes in Asian elephant cells. Meanwhile, Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientist, has been working at his own science center in Siberia studying the permafrost, a “land mass covering as much as 20 percent of the Earth’s surface.” Zimov’s research revealed that it “held a devastating secret”—it was a “ticking time bomb.” As the Arctic warms, the permafrost begins to melt, releasing carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air. Eventually, it would “release more carbon than would be created by burning all the forests on Earth three times over,” an event that “could suffocate the world.” If, Church speculated, a new generation of mammoths could be created and returned to their Siberian grazing grounds, then maybe the ecology of the late Pleistocene could be re-created and defuse the bomb. Mezrich recounts Church’s career and accomplishments in genetics as he works toward achieving this lofty goal. Along the way, he also highlights important issues in wildlife conservation. There’s a lot of science here, but on the whole, Mezrich does a good job of making it accessible.
An enthralling story only occasionally inhibited by languorous prose.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3555-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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