This authorized biography of Rosalyn Yalow is the life story of one of the few Nobel Prize-winning women in science. An outspoken woman and a complex hero in an age of superficial celebrity worship, this is the complete tale of her remarkable rise from child of uneducated immigrant parents to shining star in a male-dominated profession and world. As this story unfolds - as told by a respected physician who was her scientific colleague and friend - we learn of a young girl who against all odds grew up into one of the most venerated women in science. Her life story is related intermittently against the backdrop of her later years, when, after having won the Nobel Prize and suddenly felled by a stroke, she was brought to a hospital where, soiled with blood and unrecognized, she was "dumped" as a charity case onto another hospital. From a long line of strong women, Rosalyn emerged from being the daughter of immigrant parents struggling to make ends meet, to the young, determined woman who made it her destiny to break all barriers. Young and energetic, she broke into the sciences as a lone female graduate student in physics, outshining her male classmates. She refused to accept a conventional career as a physics teacher, and instead pioneered in the new field of nuclear medicine. Along with Solomon Berson - her brilliant and charismatic partner - she created a mom and pop scientific laboratory that rivaled and surpassed the giants in bringing new understanding to diagnosing human disease. Did breaking the gender barrier in building a world class laboratory and struggling to make a great discovery take its toll on her personal life? Straus investigates that question through first-hand interviews with Yalow, and her family, friends, and colleagues, not glossing over her complex relationship with her daughter nor the suicide of her much overshadowed brother.
Setting / LocationNew York City
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreRosalyn Yalow, nobel laureate Lead Character
"In Journey, Marsha Mason retraces the path she followed out of her difficult childhood. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a waitress and go-go dancer before landing a role in the then popular daytime TV soap opera Love of Life. After that, her world started to change, as one success led to another.". "Marsha Mason's Journey is revealing of the demands and sacrifices of the life of a successful actress, and at the same time inspiring, as she traces a lifetime spent in search of an elusive happiness. As an adult child of alcoholics, she has come to understand the forces that shaped her life and propelled her along a path that was as inevitable as it was debilitating. And now, from her present vantage point, she is able to look back with a new understanding, one that enables her to take comfort in the success she has found and find joy in learning to celebrate life."--BOOK JACKET.
Examines the lives of Barbara McClintock, Maria Mayer, Rosalyn Yalow, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, women scientists who won the Nobel Prize against extraordinary odds, in different fields and under different circumstances.
Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.
During his lifetime, Alan Jay Lerner received every imaginable award in American musical theater, and rightly so: As the lyricist of such astonishing Broadway successes as Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot, he was one of its architects. He was also one of its last greats, never quite able to regain his footing once the face of Broadway changed for good in the 1960s. Here, noted scholar of musical theater Edward Jablonski tells the story of Lerner's career and of his personal life, filling in the cracks purposely left open in Lerner's own autobiography. A well-off child of the Depression, Lerner was born in New York City, the son of the founder and president of Lerner Stores. Following an education in England and at Harvard, he ended up in New York, where he wrote advertising copy, radio scripts, and spring gambols for the Lambs Club. While lunching at the Lambs one day, he was approached by composer Frederick Loewe, who asked Lerner if he would like to work with him - and thus began a celebrated collaboration. Lerner also worked with a roll call of Broadway's and Hollywood's best, with varying degrees of success: Fred Astaire and Jane Powell (Royal Wedding), Kurt Weill (Love Life), Burton Lane (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), Leonard Bernstein (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), and, of course, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (My Fair Lady). He experienced the vertiginous highs of being at Broadway's pinnacle: My Fair Lady ran for 2,717 performances in New York, establishing Lerner's reputation as a master of urbane, highly literate songwriting. But when his money ran out - as did the Broadway for which he had been born - his life soured, and, by all accounts, it was something he himself failed to realize. Compelled to keep working by a nervous drive and a stubborn perfectionism, Lerner in later years wrote lyrics for some famously troubled productions. His personal life became just as tangled: All eight of his marriages ended in acrimonious and well-publicized dissolutions, and he was an anxiety-ridden spendthrift to the end.
Rosalyn Yalow, nobel laureate by Eugene Straus | Literally Just Books
