Conant deserves a place among the traditional “wise men” (Acheson, Harriman et al.), an elite group of white, male, East...
A biography of a “chemist, statesman, educator, and critic…[who] had within his grasp all the elements to help forge the new atomic age.”
James Conant (1893-1978) is only moderately well-known because, ironically, he accomplished not one but many things. He deserves better, and he receives it from his granddaughter, Jennet Conant (A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, 2011, etc.), a skilled historian. A quintessential New Englander (he possessed a “cold, clear-eyed Yankee pragmatism”) and superb student, Conant excelled in private school and at Harvard, where he received a doctorate in chemistry in 1916. He was an exceptional researcher, rising to become chairman of the chemistry department in 1931 and president of the university in 1933. He was a vigorous, controversial reformer, abolishing Latin requirements and athletic scholarships and allowing women to attend Harvard medical and law schools. Appointed head of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940, Conant spent the war administrating massive scientific programs, most importantly the Manhattan project. After 1945, he remained a top adviser. He declined the position of High Commissioner of Germany in 1951 but accepted in 1953 and became the first ambassador to West Germany. Conant was a brilliant chemist, an outstanding college president, a talented administrator, and an accomplished diplomat, but he was not charismatic, eccentric, or ahead of his time. Generally liberal, he had no objection to Harvard’s Jewish quota or firing teachers who invoked the Fifth Amendment. He is well-served by the 500 pages of his granddaughter’s intensely researched, insightful, and rarely dull biography.
Conant deserves a place among the traditional “wise men” (Acheson, Harriman et al.), an elite group of white, male, East Coast advisers, all pragmatic, realistic, and nonideological, who guided presidential policy from World War II through the end of the Cold War. This book gives him that place.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3088-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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