This story told in the first person starts with a child's interest in the night sky. A telescope starts a lifetime's interest in science. The narrator goes up to King's College, London to study. As a fellow at Cambridge he embarks on love affairs and searches for love at the same time as career success. Finally, contentment in love exhausts his passion for research.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
C.P. Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age 11 at Alderman Newton's School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory. In 1923 he gained an external scholarship in science at London University, whilst working as a laboratory assistant at Newton's to gain the necessary practical experience, because Leicester University, as it was to become, had no chemistry or physics departments at that time. Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Snow went on to become a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature, and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period and in 1940 'Strangers and Brothers' was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed 'George Passant' when 'Strangers and Brothers' was used to denote the series itself. Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry's technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, Snow became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. 'The Light and the Dark' was published in 1947, followed by 'Time of Hope' in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, 'The Masters', in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel 'Last Things' wasn't published until 1970. He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson's first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology. When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords. After finishing th
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Realism,
By
This review is from: Search (Textbook Binding)
It is a work of fiction, written in a realistic manner, in the first person. The book is not part of the author's STRANGERS AND BROTHERS sequence. The narrator received the gift of a telescope from his father. He kept a record of his watchings, of the rings of Saturn, for example. His astronomical phase lasted for several years. A school teacher lectured on Bohr and Rutherford. The narrator, Arthur Miles, went home and read everything he could discover about atoms. This was when he determined to pursue a research career as a scientist. In general science in the school was an arid business. The teacher had lost heart, falling down over the strictures of the logical method of teaching science. Arthur's family was very poor. His father was the secretary of a small trade association. He had a happy childhood, reading widely in an eclectic way. Miles went up to Kings College, London. Others exceeded him in their theoretical grasp of systematic physics. He had friends, Hunt and Charles Sheriff. Charles and Arthur both needed to get firsts to pursue research. It was anticipated Hunt would be an economic pundit. Arthur learned crystallographic methods at the Royal Institution. The staff was good to him, an instance of scientific unselfishness. Subsequently he went to Cambridge and to Germany. He began to shift to becoming a science writer. Later he felt that he in a way repudaited science when he learned that his friend Charles Sheriff had committed scientific deception and he did not write to the journal in which the work was published with a correction. The account of personal and scholarly crises is absorbing and of great interest to the general reader. One tends to believe that Snow has portrayed the scientific world of his day accurately.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An early C.P. Snow novel,
By Bomojaz (South Central PA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Search (Paperback)
C.P. Snow was a scientist before he was a novelist, so it's natural that this early novel would be about a scientist in crisis. Arthur Miles is a young gung-ho scientist who realizes he's made a mistake in his research, agonizes over the fact, and then quits. But he decides to help a friend, another scientist and the husband of his former lover. He is a careless, sloppy man, and Miles finds out that he, too, is making mistakes in his scientific work - only on purpose. Instead of ratting him out, however, he lets the mistakes go.Snow is an interesting writer who captures well the frustrations and moral uncertainties facing his characters. The decision that Miles makes at the end is not an easy one, and we even wonder if later on he might come to regret it. Snow's use of straight-forward narrative style is welcome in this day and age.
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