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 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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