A well-researched, engaging account of an important scientific discovery that should also find a place on women’s-studies...
A complex, rich biography of a groundbreaking geologist who discovered “a rift valley running down the center of the Atlantic,” essentially transforming 20th-century geophysics despite “mid-century American gender bias” and scientific rivalries.
In her debut, Felt (Writing/Pittsburgh Univ.) ably enriches each of the biographical, historical and scientific threads she pursues. From the 1950s through the ’70s, Marie Tharp (1920–2006) mapped the entire ocean floor, an accomplishment honored by the Library of Congress in 1997, when she was named “one of the four greatest cartographers” of the 20th century. Trained in geology and mathematics, Tharp joined a team headed by Dr. Maurice Ewing at Columbia's Lamont Geological Laboratory. They were searching for a relationship between the continental shelf and seismological events, and Tharp’s task was to collect data from ocean-bottom sounding and draft maps that they overlaid with data on earthquake activity. Tharp partnered with another member of the team, seismologist Bruce Heezen (who became her longtime lover), and they were able to correlate her maps with earthquake epicenters. This contributed to the discovery of the massive rift running through all the world's oceans and a revival of interest in continental-drift theory, which led to our modern understanding of plate tectonics. Although the duo’s work was originally dismissed by Ewing, who targeted Tharp in particular, critics were silenced by evidence revealed in a Jacques Cousteau film. The author presents Tharp's career through the prism of a woman's struggle for recognition in a traditionally male scientific field. After Heezen's tragic early death, Tharp collected and organized the record of their joint scientific accomplishments, from which Felt draws.
A well-researched, engaging account of an important scientific discovery that should also find a place on women’s-studies shelves.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9215-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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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