This biography probes the unusual mind, the dramatic life, and the outstanding scientific work of Danish-born immunologist Niels Jerne (1911-1994). Jerne's Nobel Prize-winning achievements in the field of immunology place him in the pantheon of great twentieth-century biomedical theorists, yet his life is perhaps even more interesting than his science. Science as Autobiography tells Jerne's story, weaving together a narrative of his life experiences, emotional life, and extraordinarily creative scientific work.
A legendary figure who preferred an afternoon of conversation in...

The Roofing Ceremony is a powerful, ultimately hopeful short novel that will revise the narrow view of August Strindberg as merely a misogynist and the gloomiest of Scandinavian writers. This novel has an inwardness, irreducibly and complexly human, that looks back to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

Published in Sweden in 1906 and never before translated into English, The Roofing Ceremony (Taklagsol) anticipates in its turbulent intensity the chamber plays Strindberg was soon to write. It is about a dying man, once an...

JOHN ERICSSON AND THE ENGINES OF EXILE

Leaving behind financial ruin in their ancestral Swedish village, in 1810 the Ericsson family brought their small children across the country, entering a dynamic project to link Sweden's two boundary seas with a warship canal. This move launched John Ericsson, 7, and his brother Nils, 8, into futures of great achievement.

John would, in the 1830s, in England, invent the world's first practical marine propeller and, in the 1860s, in America, invent a whole new kind of warship, the USS Monitor.

Nils' itinerary to fame lifted...