Read this then as a detailed intellectual portrait of a complex and creative scientist who nevertheless embodied the morals...
Most know that Sir Francis Galton fathered the eugenics movement (he even coined the word), but, as Gillham (Biology Emeritus/Duke Univ.) makes clear in this encyclopedic biography, that was only after sterling accomplishments in sundry other fields.
To name a few: African explorer in search of the source of the Nile in the days of Stanley and Livingstone; designer of weather maps and discoverer of the anticyclone; prime mover in establishing the uniqueness of fingerprints and hence their important forensic use; developer of the hereditary research tools of pedigree analyses and twin studies; pioneer in psychological studies of mental imagery; and innovator in statistical science, defining the coefficient of correlation and regression to the mean. Galton was the youngest of nine children born to a rich Quaker merchant who married Erasmus Darwin’s daughter Violetta. (Galton and Charles Darwin were cousins.) It was Charles who persuaded Galton to interrupt medical training to study math at Cambridge. It was Dad’s fortune that allowed Francis to devote his life to one or another intellectual pursuits. And it was Galton’s passion for measurement—collecting quantitative data for analysis—that Gillham underscores as the driving force behind Galton’s forays into science. A turning point was publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. For the rest of Galton’s long life (1822–1911), he championed heredity as the source of talent and character, in articles, speeches, and books and in the academic studies and journals he funded. Interestingly, Galton and his wife Louisa were childless. One would have liked Gillham to examine how this affected Galton—or how the presence of offspring might have altered his thinking. In general, one would have liked to know more about Galton the man apart from his scientific pursuits and controversies.
Read this then as a detailed intellectual portrait of a complex and creative scientist who nevertheless embodied the morals and principles—including the inferior position of women—of an eminent Victorian English gentleman.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514365-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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