Nobel

This vivid biography of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth recounts Buck's life in relation to the course of American and Chinese history and politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Details the politics and prejudice of the society surrounding Marie Curie, whose study of radioactivity was a watershed of scientific discovery.

A dramatic and moving biography of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia, and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize.

The 2001 film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, and Jennifer Connelly was a huge success, receiving four Academy Awards in 2002 including Best Picture.

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child and Memoirs of a Survivor.” The second volume of her autobiography is entitled, Walking in the Shade.

“…represents the full span of her works … from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world.”

“She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl's life in China… As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.”

“The myth of Marie Curie—the penniless Polish immigrant who, through genius and obsessive persistence, endured years of toil and deprivation to produce radium, a luminous panacea for all the world's ills including cancer—has obscured the remarkable truth behind her discoveries. Curie's shrewd though controversial insight was that radioactivity was an atomic property that could be used to discover new elements. While her work won her two Nobel Prizes and transformed our world, it did not liberate her from the prejudices of either the male-dominated scientific community or society. Here is an all-too-human woman trying to balance science, love, and the family values that constitute her legacy.”

Discusses the lives of these women: Marie Sklodowska Curie -- Lise Meitner -- Emmy Noether -- Gerty Rednitz Cori -- Irene Joliet Curie --Barbara McClintock -- Maria Goeppert Mayer -- Rita Levi-Montalcini --Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin -- Chien-Shiung Wu -- Gertrude Elion -- Rosalind Franklin -- Rosalyn Sussman Yalow -- Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Our print copy is a first edition. The second editon (1998) is available as an eBook.

“The commanding voice of Morrison's essays, speeches and reviews offers compelling insights into family, history, other writers and politics. The pieces span from 1971, when Morrison was an editor at Random House, to 2002, the year she won the Nobel Prize, and range from book introductions to thoughts on the nature of writing and reflections on 9/11.”

Though copyrighted in 1985, this book still is useful for it contains biographies of eight women who have won the Prize to that date.