206 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE There are also some places where the author’s generally laudable effort to broaden his study is taken to the point of becoming a minor fault. It is true, for example, that individual members of the academy were important in building up science in New York City, but it is not always clear that the academy itself had any role. In considering John Strong Newberry and Charles F. Chandler, and especially when he considers the effect of Franz Boas on scientific life in that city, his effort to center the discussion around the academy does not seem particularly helpful. Such minor arguments that I have with the author’s emphasis should not detract from the fact that this is an excellent book which makes a good contribution to our understanding of the organizational politics of science. George H. Daniels Dr. Daniels is professor of history and chairman of the Department of History at the University of South Alabama. A Mind Always in Motion: The Autobiography of Emilio Segre. By Emilio Segre. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xii+332; illustrations, notes, index. $30.00. As one might expect in an autobiography, opposite the title page there is a photograph of the subject, Emilio Segre, taken in 1946 when he was 41. This photograph is as informative a preface to what is in store for the reader as the prose preface that follows. In the photograph, Segre is seated at his desk, pen in hand, glasses on the table. The subject is wearing a suit jacket. He sports a bow tie. The photographer’s perspective is three-quarters to the side and the subject has turned his head to look squarely at the camera. He has straight, graying hair which, though combed back, hints at an unruly nature. Below the aquiline nose, the lips are full, neither smiling nor frowning. But it is the eyes that dominate. It is those eyes, burning like coals, fastened, Picasso-like, on the photographer’s lens, which say, virtually, even more emphatically, that which Segre avers in his worded preface: “I have tried to tell the unvarnished truth . . . and to report events the way I believe they occurred, as well as what I felt and thought at the time. I do not speak ill of others, and even less of myself, but I have not sought to display manners and tact I never had.” It is a textbook case of “what you see is what you get.” Because the text contains very frank assessments of family and colleagues, Segre chose not to publish the book in his lifetime. His instructions to his second wife, Rosa (his first wife, Elfriede, died in her sleep in 1970), were “Just deliver the latest set of diskettes to the publishers, and they will do the rest.” And so it was. The text is episodic. This characteristic of the story is most obvious toward the end of the book. The last thirty years of Segre’s life, a period TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 207 packed with responsibilities and activity, occupies a mere forty-five pages. Even so, the prose flows and the reader is carried along as if the vehicle had magic shock absorbers. Segre was born into an ItalianJewish family of some means. His father was a successful entrepreneur. His childhood memories were happy ones. He speaks lovingly of a close and caring extended family. From an early age he showed the kind of curiosity that one associates with people at the forefront of the arts and sciences. At the University of Rome, after several false starts, Segre settled on physics, for which he showed considerable talent. He and his close friends, such as Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, and Oscar D’Agostino, were all mesmerized by, and devoted to, their spiritual leader, Enrico Fermi. Not surprisingly then, Segre drifted into cosmic ray physics. He quickly became a member of the physics community’s international set, traveling widely in Europe and the United States. Segre left Italy for the United States in 1938. The same keen intuitions that guided his work in physics told him Italy would not long...