Beef Stroganoff Recipe in the Nightingale Book
The Shortlist
Lives of the Scientists
We COULD NOT FAIL
The First African Americans in the Space Program
Past Richard Paul and Steven Moss
300 pp. Academy of Texas, $30.
NASA'south primary mission in the 1960s was to become to the moon, but close second were its twin goals of improving the economy of the S and fighting segregation, which President Johnson considered to be inextricably linked. By edifice infinite centers in Houston; Huntsville, Ala.; rural Mississippi; and Brevard County, Fla., NASA used its prestige and financial might to challenge the profoundly racist culture of its host communities.
The agency enforced equal opportunity hiring rules (albeit poorly) for its contractors, forbade employees to participate in events at segregated institutions and brought significant numbers of educated workers to the Deep Southward. The black engineers, scientists, computer programmers, would-be astronauts and other pioneers who desegregated the space program were as courageous equally any civil rights marchers, and this is the first time their story has been told in detail.
Under force per unit area from Johnson, NASA officials seemed to bask pushing for civil rights. James Webb, NASA'due south administrator, and Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist (of all people), tangled with George Wallace equally they tried to protect their Huntsville base from "the worst segregationist excesses." Equally Paul and Moss show in this surprising and insightful history: "A common lament since 1969 has been, 'If they can put a man on the moon, why tin't they . . . ?' NASA did land men on the moon and in the process made life in the South less segregated."
HEADSTRONG
52 Women Who Inverse Science — and the Earth
By Rachel Swaby
273 pp. Broadway, paper, $xvi.
"This volume most scientists began with beef stroganoff," Swaby explains. In 2013, a New York Times obituary mentioned the rocket scientist Yvonne Brill'due south stroganoff recipe and the number of her children before getting effectually to her professional achievements. Outraged, Swaby became inspired to write this valuable collection of brisk biographical sketches of 52 women who made contributions in fields like medicine, genetics and physics. These scientists were brilliant, driven, resistant to criticism and, because few would hire or pay them, frequently forced to work for nothing.
The seismologist Inge Lehmann discovered that the globe has an inner core. Jane Wright, an African-American doctor, helped develop chemotherapy. Emmy Noether helped invent abstract algebra and create the equations to back up Einstein's general theory of relativity. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin worked out the crystal construction of vitamin B12. When she won science'south highest award, The Daily Mail announced: "Nobel Prize for British Married woman."
Some sketches correct earlier portrayals that emphasized their subjects' courtly qualities — for case, Florence Nightingale is presented here not only equally a nurturing angel with a lamp, simply as a pioneer in statistics.
Swaby tells the scientists' stories with energy and clarity. Refreshingly, spouses and children are mentioned simply when relevant — and the book is recipe-gratuitous.
ADA'S ALGORITHM
How Lord Byron's Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age
By James Essinger
254 pp. Melville Business firm, $25.95.
In this engrossing biography, Essinger argues that nosotros might take entered the calculating age two centuries ago had the contributions of Ada Lovelace been recognized in her time.
The daughter of the dissolute Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, Lovelace was pushed into mathematics early. Her mother was adamant to squelch any Byronic impulses in her just kid and to make Lovelace "completely rational," Essinger writes. Lovelace took to her studies easily, although she irritated her mother with her impulse to seek "playful uses for science and mathematics."
At the age of 17, she met Charles Babbage, then 44, and thus began 1 of the peachy friendships in the history of science. Babbage was an eccentric showman who had invented a automobile for making calculations. It was pure steampunk: whirling cogs and gears and cranks. He was envisioning a more elaborate contraption, whose workings would exist controlled by a punch-card system. He hadn't foreseen the implications of his invention — but Lovelace did. In a visionary assay, she explained that the engine could be applied to any manipulation of information, defining "operation" equally we use the term today, and writing the commencement computer programme.
In a letter to Babbage, Lovelace once wrote, "I wish to add together my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the near effective use of mankind." Essinger's biography reveals how amply she succeeded.
Half-LIFE
The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy
By Frank Close
378 pp. Bones Books, $29.99.
The v-year disappearance of the brilliant Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo is one of the Cold War's indelible mysteries, and the subject of this riveting written report.
Keeping runway of Pontecorvo was never piece of cake. Born to a wealthy Jewish family unit in Pisa, Pontecorvo worked as a researcher with Enrico Fermi, figuring out how to use neutrons to induce radioactive decay, before fleeing to Paris to escape Fascism. He so fled from Paris to southern France by bicycle as the Nazis invaded the city, and soon left Europe entirely for a job in Oklahoma. The Manhattan Project recruited him in 1943 despite a note of concern from the F.B.I.: An agent had noticed Communist literature on Pontecorvo's bookshelves. After the war, Pontecorvo joined the nuclear energy program of Britain, condign a citizen at that place — and then vanished along with his family in 1950, just to reappear in Moscow v years subsequently.
There's withal no straight prove Pontecorvo was a spy, simply Close suspects that the double agent Kim Philby had alerted Moscow to the F.B.I.'southward interest in him, which prompted the Soviets to hustle the scientist into Russia. In any case, Shut comes to the inarguable conclusion that he made the wrong bet in the Cold War: "Pontecorvo spent 43 years in Russia, where his scientific career was frustrated, his family was traumatized and his ethics were slowly crushed in the face of Soviet repression. If Pontecorvo was a spy, he was punished more than the others."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/books/review/we-could-not-fail-by-richard-paul-and-steven-moss-and-more.html
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