A fine account, heavy on science and politics, of a long, productive, peripatetic and ultimately inexplicable life.
Months after the 1950 arrest of British nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Everyone assumed that he was also a Soviet spy, but extensive investigation found no evidence that he provided secrets to the Soviets.
In this insightful biography, British physicist and writer Close (Physics/Univ. of Oxford; The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, 2011, etc.) does not ignore Pontecorvo’s brilliant research and the tortuous political turmoil of his era. (The United States Congress described him as “the second deadliest spy in history.”) Born into a wealthy, superachieving Italian family, he was 18 when he joined Enrico Fermi in Rome and contributed to groundbreaking 1934 experiments showing that slowing neutrons made them vastly more efficient in exploring the atom. Moving to France and then fleeing to America after the 1940 German invasion, Pontecorvo spent three years in a Canadian laboratory building the first heavy water reactor. Although only peripherally related to the Manhattan project, its scientists often consulted colleagues who were directly involved. In 1948, popular and highly respected, Pontecorvo moved to Britain and was working on the British atom bomb when he disappeared. Five years passed before he reappeared to express his pleasure at being a Soviet citizen, an opinion he did not publicly change until the Soviet Union collapsed. A privileged member of its scientific elite, he continued world-class research into neutrons and neutrinos. The Nobel committee has no objection to communists but dislikes controversy, so Pontecorvo’s defection probably deprived him of the prize. Close’s intense research turns up hints that he spied and, warned by other spies, fled to avoid arrest.
A fine account, heavy on science and politics, of a long, productive, peripatetic and ultimately inexplicable life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-06998-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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