History
-
Cheljabinsk-65. A nuclear accident waiting to happen again
Cheljabinsk-65 is nowadays known as Mayak, one of the biggest nuclear complexes in the world. In 1957 a tank with nuclear waste exploded at Mayak, spreading nuclear materials for miles around. The Soviet government hushed up the accident. They also didn’t inform people living there that the facility was dumping radioactive waste water in the…
-
The Book of Gutsy Women, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton (ISBN 9781471172175, Simon & Schuster)
I came across this book a long time ago, not long after it was first published in 2020. This was near the end of Trump’s first presidency and after the debacle of Hilary’s election campaign in 2016. The book is basically a collection of short articles about women that inspired Hilary and Chelsea Clinton. The…
-
Eleanor Roosevelt: A Guide to Inner Strength
‘Do what you feel in your heart to. be right – for you’ll be critisised anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.‘― Eleanor Roosevelt
-
The Importance of Universal Human Rights at Home
‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin ? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighbourhood he lives in, the school or college he attends, the factory, farm,…
-
Ain’t I a woman ?
‘That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman ? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and…
-
Lise Meitner. A Life in Physics, Ruth Lewin Sime (ISBN 978-0-520-20860-5, University of California Press)
This is the second biography of Lise Meitner I read. After reading the biography by Patricia Rife I was at first hesitant to also go and read this book by Ruth Lewin Sime. But after finishing the book I have to say it was well worth every minute. Where the biography of Patricia Rife focused…
-
Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Patricia Rife (ISBN 978-0817637323, Birkhäuser)
A very nice biography about one of the ‘forgotten’ women of science. I came across a reference to this book somewhere and decided to read it as part of my ‘atomic’ theme. It also fits nicely into a series of books I am reading about women scientists. I had read the excellent ‘The making of…
-
Vienna ahead of the curve
‘By the end of the century, Vienna had given birth to Viktor Adler’s socialism and Theodor Herzl’s Zionism. It was the home Sigmund Freud loved to hate and the political base for Karl Lueger, the city’s longtime mayor, whose heady mix of pupulism and anti-Semitism drew the rapt attention of the young Adolf Hitler. If…
-
Turning point. The bomb and the Cold War
I recently was tipped about this Netflix series about the atomic bomb and the Cold War so I decided to give it a try. It fitted with much of my recent reading about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes and Leslie Groves. The series has 9 episodes of roughly 70…
Response 418 