A touching, three-dimensional portrait of the Polish-born scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner. Armed with new archival material, including eloquent letters Marie Curie (18671934) wrote to her husband, Pierre, after his death, Quinn (A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, not reviewed) focuses less on the discoveries of radium and radioactivity and more on the personality that stamped Curie as a woman both of and ahead of her time. Here is Maria Sklowdoska, a fierce nationalist growing up under the heel of the Russian occupation of Poland, encouraged to independence and defiance in schools that taught two curricula: One was the official Russian; the other, hidden, was Polish language and history. Then there is Marie, a student in Paris, who chooses physics, mathematics, and Pierre. Idylls bicycling by the sea and in the countryside, the birth of two daughters, and the first Nobel Prize give way to the untimely death in 1906 of Pierre, crushed under the wheels of a wagon on a Paris street. Marie took his place as lecturer at the Sorbonne, yet could scarcely bear to mention his name in public. But there was to be a second love: the physicist Paul Langevin, a devoted student of Pierre's—and a married father of four. Langevin's wife used every weapon, including threats of murder and the publishing of purloined love letters, to save her marriage. She won, turning the world against Curie. In time, the storm passed, Curie's fame was secure, and she presided over a large laboratory and staff, living to see daughter Iräne and her husband, FrÇdÇric Joliot, emerge as scientific standard-bearers in a proud family tradition. Quinn's study makes it clear that Curie's twin passions—for life and for science—sustained her thorough formidable personal tragedies and public catastrophes. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-67542-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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