The Atheist and the Holy City: Encounters and Reflections (First Edition)

Klein is widely known for his innovative cancer research and is one of Sweden's best-selling authors. He was awarded the Letterstedt Prize the Swedish Pulitzer for the original Swedish edition (Stockholm, 1987) of this collection of essays on religion, philosophy, music, sexuality, as well as his early childhood in Hungary and subsequent escape from the Nazis. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

This collection of essays by a noted cancer researcher belongs to the tradition of science writing followed by Lewis Thomas, who contributes an introduction. Klein, a Hungarian-born biologist who fled Nazi persecution and has lived in Sweden since 1947, depicts science as a vast communal enterprise shaped by individual genius. He offers an intimate portrait of a fellow Hungarian Jew, atomic scientist Leo Szilard, who helped organize the Manhattan Project, then became disenchanted and tried to dissuade Truman from using the bomb. In another piece Klein contrasts Epstein-Barr virus, a "wise old" germ, with HIV--causative agent of AIDS--"the aggressive youngster who doesn't know what he's doing." Travel sketches jump from Finnish Lapland to Jerusalem, site of the moving title essay in which Klein posits altruism as a counterforce to "selfish DNA's" blind game of aimless reproduction.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These elegant and learned essays are developed from a foreword that Klein wrote for Peter Noll's In the Face of Death ( LJ 12/89). Klein himself, a world-renowned cancer researcher, has spent his adult years inquiring into the intricacies of life, both at the cellular level and as a participant in the human condition. As a youth he witnessed the Nazi invasion of Hungary, and later he discovered the shocking cooperation of scientists with the "final solution." This firsthand experience of evil has given him a compassionate and ethical outlook, a distrust of power and social planners, and an impatience with mediocrity. Since 1951 he has done research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, probing the "co-existence between viruses and man" and the willfulness of "selfish DNA." Claiming to be an atheist, he yet approaches his work religiously, with devotion and a little humor. This book won the Letterstedt Prize, Sweden's equivalent of the Pulitzer.
- Carol J. Lichtenberg, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.