Brenda Maddox writes a book that amalgamates her subject's technical performance with her human frailties. She presents Rosalind Franklin as technically gifted and thorough to a degree most mortals would not comprehend, with a personality that is simultaneously beautiful & hostile, fragile & robust, all in the one human being.

What is refreshing is Maddox' honesty in dealing with her subject, and the intense warmth she brings to her. The counterpoint of Rosalind's scientific brilliance on the one hand and her vulnerability on the other makes her an absorbing character. She inspires as being prosaic at one level, artless at another and exceptionally diligent and intelligent.

But in the end Brenda Maddox leaves another message - that Rosalind Franklin despite her strengths and weaknesses, was beautifully human. And this is the refreshing part.

This is a fine biography that both covers Franklin's life very well and provides a solid sketch of the world she lived in, without going into the endless detail that some "life and times" biographies do. The book provides a clear understanding of who Franklin was and how she acted, both good and bad. She was a brilliant scientist and a warm, caring friend to many; on the other side she was a perfectionist (it goes with the brilliance) and an intellectual snob. It's the task of biography to show us the whole person, and this book does that.

The book also provides a fascinating description of the world of postwar science in Britain. It was still the era of "small science" in which brilliant individuals made major discoveries while working in cramped, dirty conditions with minimal facilities and what now seem absurdly small budgets. Individual scientists still designed their own equipment (one of Franklin's early contributions was the design of an improved X-ray camera) and still spent endless days on pencil-and-paper mathematical computations unless they were lucky enough to get permission from the budget gods to hire a "computer" human to do the arithmetic for them.

By covering Franklin's career in detail, Maddox makes clear that her work on DNA was only part of her career, and probably not the most important part. When she died the arc of her career was still climbing. Had Franklin lived she would have been a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize based not on her role in DNA but on research done later by her own team of researchers under her own direction. Her death at age 37 cutting her career short was a loss to all human society.

"Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady Of DNA", is a biography, and is not so laden with science that the lay-person cannot read and enjoy the work. But I did read, and will comment, as a lay-reader who is fascinated by the people and the methods they used to uncover one of the great discoveries in the History of Science.

I found this book recommended in The Scientific American magazine. Despite its reputation for being for the trained scientist, or very well studied amateur, the magazine routinely suggests very approachable books for the inquisitive reader. The biography is very readable, and when science becomes integral to the story, the explanations offered together with the diagrams, make the science accessible to the lay-reader. The discussion of DNA is limited to the parts that were to play such a controversial role in who was given credit, received Nobel Prizes, or in this book, the woman, Rosalind Franklin, who was pushed aside. The reasons she was kept from the honors and recognition she deserved are many, and the book covers them in great detail, but as strong a reason as any was the fact she was a pioneer as a female in what was then, virtually an entirely all men's discipline. She also became terminally ill just as the papers and announcements regarding the discoveries of the famed double-helix were being published, and this made her marginalization all that much easier.

The names Watson and Crick are synonymous with the discovery of the double helix of DNA. What is less well known is that their discovery happened when it did, not only because of their work, but the absolutely critical and essential work done by Rosalind Franklin. A photograph she took, entitled simply number 51, was shown without her knowledge together with other information that made the announcements of Watson and Crick possible long before they otherwise would have been possible to proclaim.

Rosalind Franklin was to die at age 37, and 4 short years later Nobel Prizes were given out to those that benefited directly and substantially from her work. The better part of half a century has passed, and despite the naming of buildings, science research facilities, and attempts to revise the historical record to give this amazing woman her due, it will never be enough.

Brenda Maddox has written an important work for everyone as she is helping to document a historical record that was deeply flawed, and now slowly is being corrected. This book is important to so many for the same reason the name Watson and Crick are so important. Rosalind Franklin was one of the keys to the discovery of DNA, her work made Watson and Crick's announcements possible, and History should be taught correctly. Students today should know the most accurate version of what took place, not simply what has become generally accepted wisdom

Equally important is why her work was shared unethically, without her knowledge, and why such behavior was tolerated. This book goes a long way toward exposing these valid questions and why it is so important the record be accurate.

There is no way to know whether Rosalind Franklin would have been given The Nobel Prize along with Watson and Crick had she lived. The number of women honored by that society is absurdly small, and again the author demonstrates not only how many amazing women have been excluded, but how many men you would expect to see rewarded were passed over for names that will surprise you. The examples given cover literature, and the honorees and those ignored will amaze you.

One fact is certain, The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, and unless that were ever to change any persons who may have been deserving will never be recognized. Maybe it is enough that the historical record is being corrected, for even if it is not, certain manners of honoring historic contributions to science will always be closed to Rosalind Franklin and that is simply unjust.

This book won the Whitbread prize in the U.K.-and deservedly so. It is a thoroughly researched, vivid and well written portrait of a brilliant miner's son writing against a death sentence he would never acknowledge-tuberculosis. After assisting the death of his all-important mother, Lawrence was supported by a wife whom he stole from another man (actually, she had him in bed within 20 minutes of meeting him, in her then-husband's house, too.) Freida was highly sexed and also almost compulsively unfaithful to him. They had dreadful fights, but somehow never actually split up. Brings alive the hothouse intellectual atmosphere of the Fabians, Freidians and Edwardian England, and the awful (and for Lawrence personally humiliating) cultural oppression of both Britain and America in the teens and twenties. You also get to travel around the world with the couple-Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Taos N.M., and Mexico, meeting the famous and infamous as you go. And with many well-chosen excerpts from Lawrence's letters, poetry and novels, you get a level of understanding of where his books came from which is very helpful in appreciating them. And him. I made the mistake of taking this book to Las Vegas. I didn't do any gambling.

This book is about a step-parent getting ready to meet her step kids. She has been dating her step kids dad for quit some time. They had ended up getting married. Know she has a big day of finally meeting her step kids. It has taken her a long time because of the kids real mother dying. The kids had said to there father that they wanted there mom and dad and that was it. There dad had said something to the kids on meeting a women and they where very upset with that. So the Step parent is really afaird on want the kids are going to say and think about her. I liked this book because it is good for kids who's parents had split up.

The story of Nora and James Joyce's unconventional relationship and how it shaped the writings of one of history's most controversial authors. This book is nothing short of riveting, both in terms of the story it is telling and the way it is told. It explores the influence Nora held over Joyce in his life and his writing and gives countless examples of how he used the experiences of those around him in his books. More than anything, this is the story of a woman struggling to hold her life and her family together in the face of hardship after hardship. A truly incredible read that I couldn't put down until the last page - I even read the bibliography!

I'm a life long Joyce fan and I have to admit that I enjoyed this life of Jim's wife (only she could call him Jim!) Nora even more than I did the three volume Ellman biography of Joyce himself. In fact, Joyce fans will probably learn more about Joyce's writing by reading about his wife than about him. This is one of the most outstanding biographies I have ever read -- it's fascinating to learn how Joyce used Nora's every utterance somewhere in his works even though she herself never read Ulysses.

Having grown up in a small town much like Joyce's Dublin, this book has a special significance for me. I've seen so many people from my town graduating from high school without really understanding that there is an entire world outside the place they grew up and lacking the ambition to go explore it. I fear many of them will spend their lives "getting by" in a job they hate, raising children who will inevitably do the same thing. Joyce's "Dubliners" depicts this cycle with as much complexity and compassion as any author I've read.

In an age where the most publicized fiction tends to be simple-minded and genre-bound, it's refreshing to come across a writer with Joyce's complexity. "Dubliners" is so rich in its intellectual and symbolic atmosphere that many readers may be put off by the overall weight of the prose. The writing is so thick with metaphorical contexts that the literal content of the story occasionally becomes obscured, which can be frustrating for those not used to reading Joyce. Yet, while difficult, "Dubliners" is far from impossible to decipher, and although these stories function well as a whole, they are also more or less self-contained, which makes "Dubliners" easier to get through than Joyce's other works(it's a lot easier to take on a ten page short story than a 600+ page novel like "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake"). For readers who are new to Joyce, this would be a good place to start.

A final note: since this book is old enough to be considered a "classic," there are a plethora of editions available from various publishers. I own the Vintage edition (ISBN: 0679739904). Not only is it a quality printing (not that cheap newspaper ink that rubs off on your fingers), it also contains about a hundred pages of criticism at the end that help shed light on Joyce's often illusive themes. Normally I shun forewards and afterwards (I like to think I've read enough to discover a story's theme on my own), but in the case of Joyce I found that a push in right direction can mean the difference between enjoyment and frustration.

Dubliners is a collection of short stories ranging through chidhood, adolescence and adulthood ending with three public life stories and the grand finale "The Dead" Critics have associated many of the stories to Joyce's personal life as he to became dissillusioned with his home city of Dublin. In each story we find a struggle for escapement from each character with the ever burdening features of alcohol and religion amongst other things trapping the protaganists from breaking out of the Dublin mould. Hopes are often dashed such as those of Eveline and Duffy. Joyce intelligently creates an interplay of senses towards the end of each story which creates an epiphany and a defining moment in the life of each character. Throughout the book the characthers start in the middle of nowhere and end up in the middle of nowhere. The text starts with the phrase: "There was no hope for him this time", which symbolises the book perfectly with paralysis being a continuing theme throughout the text ending in the final component: "The Dead". Overall this is a fascinating insite into how Joyce viewed his birth place. Joyce himself can be viewed in many of the characters including Duffy who found love with Sinico in: "A Painful Case" and felt awkward at her death as he had let her go. A thoroughly enjoyable book where nothing actually happens!

My first encounter with Joyce was an English Lit. course in college, some twenty years ago now. We were assigned to read an anthologized version of "The Dead", and I initially approached it as one does all such reading requirements at that foolish age; however, this particular story ending up affecting me quite unlike anything I had ever read before. Dubliners is a beautifully written collection of thematically inter-related stories involving day to day life in early 20th century Dublin - stories that masterfully evoke what Faulkner described in his Nobel address as being the essential nature of true art: A portrayal of the human heart in conflict with itself. "The Dead" is the final story in the collection, and my favorite. I have re-read it numerous times and am so consumed by it that I'm not even able to provide an objective review. The final pages, from the point where Gabriel and Greta leave the party, to the end of the story, are absolutly stunning; the poetry of the words, the profound humanity represented - defies description. As in the final line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" - You must change your life.

Maddox's focus is on the people that revolved around Yeats--his wife, lovers, relatives, and peers. She relays several intimate anecdotes concerning Yeats's troubled relationships with his parents, his obsessions with women like Maude Gonne and her daughter, Iseult, and his interaction with a long line of "mother figures" (most notably, Lady Gregory).

Reading this book gave me the impression that Yeats wrote not just because he was inspired by Ireland and metaphysical themes; but as a need to escape his stifling environment.

While providing many interesting details about Mrs. Yeats's "abilities" with automatic writing, Maddox goes far in portraying Georgie as more of a controlling wife than a powerful medium. This, along with Yeats's own "psychic experiences" may lead a skeptic to wonder just how sane the poet actually was.

The section dealing with his term as a Free State Senator was good, in terms of illustrating Yeats' ongoing battle against censorship and civic divorce (in contrast with his reported stances on fascism and eugenics). Readers can revel in how Yeats, while conservative in such things as parenting, thoroghly enjoyed playing the "dirty old man" in various media--print, theater, and radio. As far as a deeper insight into Yeats as mystical poet, though, the book's treatment of the man is sketchy at best.

Imagine a poet who is so absorbed in his interior life and imagination that his wife resorts to speaking with the dead and the spirit world--simply to keep the man interested. That's what Barbara Maddox insists in her wonderfully inclusive biography, "Yeats's Ghosts."

By nearly every assessment, W. B. Yeats stands as the greatest poet of the 20th Century. The ultimate symbolist, Yeats, however, remains an exceptionally difficult poet to fully appreciate--mainly because of the arcane and personal perspectives and references that litter nearly every one of his poems. Many readers, in fact, find it necessary to purchase a concordance of his work, and one publisher even offers a guide to the works of a poet who himself chose to speckle his books with countless footnotes and clarifications. Which, only naturally, are together a godsend.

"Yeats's Ghosts," a controversial biography by the award-winning Barbara Maddox, may help readers to understand the milleux in which Yeats wrote--the current events that engendered work after work, the personal friends to and about whom many were originally composed, and the continual wash of Celtic mythology--but what's especially entertaining about the book is its unique take on one of the most contentious issues regarding Yeats.

Yeats, after all, was a mystic--a mystic in the old Celtic Tradition--caught between scientific rationalism on the one hand and orthodox Christianity on the other. Like many Irishmen living on the cusp of the modern age, Yeats actively hoped for a renaissance of ancient Irish virtues--something along the lines of prewar Germany's obsession with getting rid of influences that had garbled and partially eradicated national and racial identities.

A member of the famous Order of the Golden Dawn (along with the maleviolent Aleister Crowley), Yeats, according to some, indulged in the occult; others find that probability suspect, citing that it is hard to believe that a poet of such gifts would be such a pushover for what most people consider "spurious information." Whatever the case, as Maddox quickly reveals, Yeats as a personality was definitely not of this age, an age that has yet to make a compromise with the imagination as a cultural and artistic force. In fact, without an understanding of the occult nuances hidden within his poems, most readers will find themselves frustrated with another collision with the inpenetrable words of a brilliant man and seminally Irish poet.

The book begins with Yeats's marriage on-the-rebound--at fifty-- to Georgie Hyde-Lee, an attractive bohemian he'd met through the Golden Dawn. But he's still obsessed with his almost mythical femme fatale, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne--and infatuated with her daughter Iseult. Yeats was probably not as conducive to marriage as he wanted to be, and, according to Maddox, his new wife quickly sensed it. When she began a regimen of automatic writing to contact the spirit world, however, Yeats's interest rapidly rose, and over the course of their marriage, it may have been Georgie's flirtations with the occult that held the marriage together.

There are, of course, other "ghosts" in Maddox's life of Yeats, his relationship to an emotionally unavailable mother amongst them, but many of Maddox's assertions are too much of a flirtation with another relatively spurious paradigm, Freudianism. Some of her readings in the yellow light of psychoanalysis are really a reach--she's really digging, really really digging--and it's necessary to remember that Yeats's poetry is not defiant of definition but out of its realm completely. Not surprisingly, Maddox's drive to find a reasonable explanation for an inner life completely enthralled with the imaginary tends to limit what she is seeking to convey--a fully understandable vision of a poet who, for all practical purposes, spurned the idea of personality, at least in its more traditional manifestations. Consequently, Maddox's pictures seem more like snapshots that tend to trivialize a man who, more than likely, will never be fully understood. Often the object of Maddox's well-written tale comes off as a deluded old fool--although anyone who has read and wondered over the majesty of his poetic works can't help but wonder if there really wasn't something to the imaginary world in which he thrilled.

Look, Brenda Maddox is a journalist not a scholar. She has little to say about the poems and her sources are nothing new. But she writes a lively prose with a deft eye for the human angle in describing the parade of remarkable women who passed through Yeats's later life. I don't think she's out to replace the more detailed biographies other reviewers mention so much as add color and detail to the standard portrait of the 'smiling public man.'

The book's centerpiece is the early years of Yeats's marriage to his wife George, a cultivated woman twenty-seven years his junior who turned what looked to be a marriage of convenience into a source of great poetic inspiration. George began channeling spirits on their honeymoon which, over the next two years, revealed to Yeats an entire philosophy of history and the soul's fate after death while also dictating how an older, indifferent lover ought to treat a young new wife. Maddox leaves the question of the Script's authenticity open, pointing out on the one hand how well it suited George's purposes and on the other how sincerely she shared Yeats's occult beliefs. Halfway through the book though, after a short, out of place chapter on Yeats's mother, she leaves George behind to concentrate on the eccentricities of Yeats's later years. Yeats had a capacity for staying 'forever young' that led to some odd connections; he involved himself, especially after the Steinach operation, with a cast of dubious individuals who took him away from the unwanted responsibilities of home and family.

I don't think Maddox is trying to pull Yeats off a pedestal--she clearly believes the poems he wrote in these years are great. She's also fair-minded in dealing with Yeats's Fascist sympathies, his late passion for eugenics and the bad rap he's gotten from feminists. But showing how much care and indulgence his work required from others, especially the women he chose to attend to his needs, reminds you that greatness is often a collaborative effort. Giving credit where credit is due for Yeats's late achievement, especially in the case of his long-suffering wife George, takes nothing away from his achievement. Just the opposite; I admired the poetry all the more knowing the personal hopes and (sometimes) blindnesses it grew out of. A fun, instructive read.