Overview

Kathleen Lonsdale was a groundbreaking chemist who was instrumental in developing the science of crystallography. She was also a midlife convert to Quakerism who campaigned for peace and prison reform. Horrified by the dropping of the first atomic bombs, Lonsdale felt that the entire scientific community was now tainted by the violence it had enabled. Published in 1957, Is Peace Possible? was her attempt to make amends for this communal guilt by demonstrating that science can bring peace as well as war, and can address the 'big questions' generally left to the humanities. In crystalline language and logic honed from a lifetime of relying on the sharpness of her mind to cut through barriers of class and gender, Kathleen Lonsdale's Is Peace Possible? is a work of quiet, elegant sanity that refuses to be bullied by the received wisdom of war's inevitability. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in history, but its themes are eternally relevant, and even more necessary now than when it was written.

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9781837264216

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Reviews

Perspectival and prophetic . . . At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible * * Marginalian * * A compelling case that wars are fought over scarce resources . . . It seems to me this is even more relevant today than it was then * * Leighton Buzzard Observer * *

Author Information

Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-71) was an Irish pacifist, prison reformer and crystallographer. She was one of the first two women elected as Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1945, the first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the outgrown name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and maker of The Universe in Verse - a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.

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