BOOKS MAY 16, 2012 edited by Jeffrey Kovac and Michael Weisberg
Oxford University Press, 416 pp., $35 SCIENCE, LIKE ART, is a
human expression. Roald Hoffmann has given a great deal of
thought to how to convey this truth, which lies at the heart of
the essays collected in his new book. He understands, perhaps
better than most, the importance of humanity to science: how
science, the beautiful search for the sublime—the “joy of self-
assertion ... in the face of an uncontrollable world”—is no
longer science when it is stripped of its humanity. “I was born
in a happy young Jewish family in unlucky times, 1937,” Hoffmann
tells of his childhood in Ukraine. “In that war, most of us
perished ... among those who were killed were my father, three
of four grandparents, three aunts, and so on.” Hoffmann, his
mother, and his sister survived by hiding in a schoolhouse
storeroom. He returned there many years later to find that the
storeroom had been rebuilt as a classroom: “It’s a chemistry
classroom,” he says simply. “Such