If the life of the American-born scientist Count Rumford had been created in a novel, nobody would believe it. This new biography chronicles all his achievements and escapades. Born near Boston in 1753, Benjamin Thompson showed an early aptitude for scientific subjects and a passion for rigor and organization. At 19, working as a schoolmaster, he married a rich widow who introduced him into society. As Brown (The Big Bang: A History of Explosives, not reviewed) makes clear, Thompson assiduously cultivated his newly forged connections with Royalist authorities. Spying for the British when the Revolution broke out, he fled to England, without his wife and two-year-old daughter, in 1776—never to return. His political connections got him a commission as a full colonel and a knighthood, and his scientific investigations of gunnery won him election to the Royal Society. Then he headed to Bavaria, where he almost instantly won high office, reforming the military and instituting workhouses for the poor—the entire time, apparently, spying for England. Promoted to count, he took the name Rumford, after the New Hampshire town where he had abandoned his wife. As a scientist, he took a particular interest in heat; his experiments not only helped establish the kinetic theory of heat, but led him to develop significant improvements in domestic heating, lighting, and cookery. His discoveries also prompted him to don white clothing in winter, as the best means for preserving body heat—a choice that marked him as eccentric. Back in England, he helped establish the British Institute, a major force for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, he accumulated a string of mistresses, including the widow of the French chemist Lavoisier, whom he married in 1805. He lived out his final days in Paris, an eccentric to the end. Brown’s telling of Rumford’s tale is somewhat pedestrian, but the mere facts are enough to make this a page-turner. (8 pages b&w illus.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7509-2184-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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