An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Father of The Cyclotron
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. 576 pages. Illustrations. Honors. Sources. Index. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Herbert Childs (1904-1971) was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and educated at Macalester College, He became a magazine editor and freelance writer while still in his early twenties. Hoping to write the life of a famous character in Patagonia, he took his bride to that remote land on a yearlong honeymoon that resulted in his first book, El Jimmy. A captain in the infantry during World War II, he served in occupied Japan. His novel, Way of a Gaucho, was made into a motion picture. In researching An American Genius, Herbert Childs steeped himself in Ernest O. Lawrence’s correspondence and other papers and has had over eight hundred interviews with people in all walks of life who knew the physicist. Derived from a Kirkus review: Ernest Orlando Lawrence's mother used to like to say of him that he was born grown up. However, there was such a thing as play in his boyhood, and he retained a youthful exuberance into his fifties, according to his biographer, until attrition from his responsibilities set in. Herbert Childs records the life of E. O. Lawrence, a Nobel Prize physicist at thirty-eight, from his South Dakota beginnings through his studies, his emergence with the construction of the cyclotron, his long association as physicist, professor, then director of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Lawrence remained aloof from politics, differed with Oppenheimer over his position. His own, that science should best help humanity by doing its job, and later, working on the hydrogen bomb, that it would be immoral for science to refuse further understanding of natural processes on any grounds. The author has done his homework, his book insightful, and the memorial of an element, lawrencium, is to the point. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley, Oppenheimer, Cyclotron, Nobel Prize, Atomic Energy, Lawrencium, Luis Alvarez. Vannevar Bush, Arthur Compton, Donald Cooksey, Leslie Groves, Los Alamos, Manhattan Project, Glenn Seaborg, Merle T
[Book #83137]
Price: $250.00