Borrowing the techniques of an accomplished novelist for biographical purposes, Shipman brings to vivid life a character...
An imaginative life of the controversial Dutch scientist (1858–1940) who discovered the first specimen of Homo erectus in Java in 1891.
Award-winning science writer Shipman (Taking Wing, 1998, etc.) has created an intimate, utterly convincing portrait of the long-misunderstood scientist who from his youth was obsessed with the notion of discovering the “missing link.” Employing the present tense throughout, Shipman (Anthropology/Pennsylvania State Univ.) achieves an immediacy that propels her text to its sobering conclusion, in which the aged, lonely scientist intransigently insists on his theories as anthropological research (many of whose techniques he pioneered) passes him by. The story begins in February 1937 when Dubois, living in virtual seclusion, receives a letter from a dear friend he has not seen in many years. The letter stimulates memories and sets off a lengthy flashback. During his youth in Holland, Dubois’s conventional, firmly Catholic family could not appreciate the genius of young Eugène, who even in boyhood maintained a strict schedule of study. He later married and was in the midst of a successful academic career in anatomy when discoveries of Neanderthal remains rekindled his youthful interest in human evolution. He joined the Dutch military as a physician and headed with his young family to Sumatra, then Java, where he eventually pursued his passion for fossil hunting full-time. Dubois mercilessly drove himself and his helpers, but eventually his persistence rewarded him with a skullcap, femur, and teeth from a specimen he believed belonged to the species he had sought so long. He spent much of the rest of his life struggling to convince his skeptical colleagues. Shipman invents many of Dubois’s conversations, emotions, and thoughts, but they all rest on her comprehensive, meticulous research.
Borrowing the techniques of an accomplished novelist for biographical purposes, Shipman brings to vivid life a character whose scientific work rivaled Galileo’s in its drama. (53 b&w illustrations, 7 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85581-X
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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