A scientist’s candid, unnerving memoir in which her profession takes a back seat to personal struggles.
An Egyptian American astrophysicist describes a turbulent life.
Nance was educated at a religious private school, where her fascination with the stars overcame her reluctance to quarrel with the school’s minister about spiritual matters. Though her parents were loving, they fought constantly. They separated for the first time when the author was in high school, and they got divorced while she was in graduate school. With a chaotic home life, Nance took shelter in education and her yearning to become an astronomer. Readers will admire her ability to overcome the expected barriers, including sexist teachers and a lack of female mentors and classmates. Most of the text describes the miseries of her personal life; at one point during high school, both parents moved out, leaving her to live alone for much of the year. The author fell in love with a fellow college student, but he turned out to be jealous and abusive. Later, her father was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. After she discovered that she inherited his cancer gene, which would likely lead to breast cancer, she underwent a double mastectomy in her early 20s. The remainder of the book recounts her progress to a career in astrophysics, and Nance discusses inspirational teachers and exhilarating experiences contemplating the heavens, often pausing for short, stand-alone essays on astronomical basics, including planets, black holes, and the Big Bang. The author is unafraid to admit being overwhelmed by her setbacks and recounts a steady stream of crushing disappointments, anxiety, panic attacks, psychotherapy, depression, and treatment for PTSD. “It is at night,” she writes, “when my work pauses and I have no structure, that the terror takes over, when I feel invisible claws wrapping around my heart and squeezing my chest.” At the conclusion, she has found love and a satisfying career.
A scientist’s candid, unnerving memoir in which her profession takes a back seat to personal struggles.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593186794
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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