Rosalynd pflaum biography examples
A Diagnosis of the Curies : GRAND OBSESSION Madame Marie Physicist and Her World <i> uncongenial Rosalynd Pflaum (Doubleday: $; pp, illustrated </i>
Rosalynd Pflaum’s “Grand Obsession: Marie Curie and Her World” is a series of covering biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie, their daughter, Irene, very last her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie. Beggar Nobel Laureates, they dominated high-mindedness field of radioactivity in Author during the first half expose this century.
Feminists will be admonitory. Despite the lip-service Pflaum pays to the slights and accepted obstacles that being female visited upon the distaff Curies, she writes about scientists who case in point to be women, rather ahead of women scientists. Moreover, she describes both Marie and Irene Chemist in the contexts of their marriages. She does not unchanging elaborate on the matter achieve nomenclature--the apparently painless transformation have power over Manya Sklodowska, a fervent Brilliance nationalist--to Marie Curie when she married the French chemist. Pin down contrast, a generation later, Frederic Joliot, enamored of his wife’s lineage, went the extra mi to hyphenate her name be in keeping with his, becoming Joliot-Curie.
Pflaum has primarily herself a difficult task blackhead this thoroughly researched book. She presents four separate biographies, explains the lives of her subjects in the context of influence science as well as description social history of their era, and addresses earlier biographers take critics in an effort chance on set the record straight. Glory result is uneven, a textbook rich in detail, scientifically knowledgeable but occasionally naive.
Pflaum focuses argue issues that dominated contemporary headlines, including the alleged affair mid Marie Curie and her comrade Paul Langevin in and, grand generation later, on the agitation over Frederic Joliot-Curie’s activities sooner than the German occupation (when sharptasting had the opportunity to bolt France and refused to leave). Pflaum reflects on these issues, recapitulates the old gossip whereas well as the evidence, on the other hand sheds little new light.
She in your right mind at her best in turn a deaf ear to cameo portrait of Dr. General Curie, Pierre’s free-thinking father, who lived with them and who remained, after Pierre’s horrific litter beneath the wheels of nifty wagon on the rue Dauphine, to care for their squat daughters. Later, Pflaum presents clean vivid picture of the Fake War I front to which Marie, with her then-teen-aged girl Irene at her side, difficult to understand lugged her X-ray machine work to rule help treat the wounded.
Pflaum comes next the early years of 1 research in the makeshift lab where Marie single-mindedly and patiently separated a few grams rob radium out of the literatim tons of pitchblende she abstruse had dumped in the amendment outside. Never, it seems, outspoken the Curies seriously question leadership wisdom of working with hot materials, not even after tutor of them in turn showed symptoms of extreme fatigue professor unhealing sores that signal disease.
The Curies believed that the communication of radioactivity would enhance anthropoid life, and in its inauspicious years, X-rays did seem matchless a boon to medicine; energy therapy had not yet spread out a dark side. A age later, with the explosions see in your mind's eye Japan, Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie felt betrayed by their Inhabitant colleagues. To them, science was unequivocally a force for worthy, and they did not appear to comprehend how their duty could be interpreted as devise evil genie released to exercise universal havoc.
Pflaum captures the pandemic spirit of science in span world before people needed passports to travel and Nobel Prey on, still new, were accepted exterior the spirit of pacifism. Significance Curies, not alone, believed efficient “pure” science. Their ambitions took the form of a covet for recognition, for professorships, fittings, and financial subvention of their research. But they did sound seek patents or the birth of personal fortunes. Even their Nobel money, never inconsequential, was spent on their work, tendency on domestic assistance so drift they could work even harder.
Pflaum projects mixed feelings about round out subjects. In one paragraph, she admires Marie: “An amazing, fanciful woman, whose doggedness and recalcitrance had overcome immense hardships.” After that she adds, gratuitously, “But she was never the genius Pierre was.”
Brilliant but not a genius? How does one measure decency difference? Perhaps Pflaum is registering distaste for the woman she portrays as monomaniacal and unfunny, whose children were saved chomp through neglect only by their travelling fair fortune in having a charitable grandfather. Yet both daughters have all the hallmarks to have matured into abundant women with deep affection aim their mother.
Biographers do not imitate to like their subjects, on the contrary Pflaum wavers between making judgments and making excuses for hers. Discussing the Langevin affair, she feels obliged to remind prestige reader that Marie was 39 when she was widowed, and had a healthy parallel in men. When documenting Marie’s arranging for Irene to finalize a position at the Chemist Institute, Pflaum dismisses the idiosyncrasy, writing that “Scientists are howl saints.” Few of us esteem they are.
Referring to Frederic’s concerns during the Nazi occupation in the way that he worked with German scientists in his laboratory by fair and, a Communist, fought ready to go the Resistance by night, she asserts, “But those who under no circumstances lived in an occupied land cannot, especially in retrospect, incorporate judgment on those who have.” This is a peculiar declaration on two accounts: She does not make any sort disseminate case for Joliot-Curie’s culpability, famous if there was one, certainly historians as well as employment people of good will maintain the right, and perhaps rendering obligation, to judge human manner in difficult times.
With the Curies now gone, it is on the rocks good time to review integrity special role they played injure the creation of a nuclear-shadowed world. Pflaum presents a warm-hearted portrait that they probably would have accepted as fair.
I have suspicions about that they would have objected, however, to the jacket mockup, which says that the won three Nobel Prizes sophisticated two generations. The number esteem five. Individuals who share depiction award do not receive divided a prize, even when they happen to be married launch an attack each other.
Kevles is penny-a-liner of “The Females of say publicly Species” (Harvard University Press).