Carla Killough McClafferty

STARRED REVIEW IN BOOKLIST

BOOKLIST
Rescue stories bring hope to the Holocaust darkness, and this stirring account of a young New York City journalist who secretly helped more than 2,000 refugees escape Nazi-occupied France blends exciting adventure with the grim history. Before the U.S. entered the war, Fry, 32, spent a year in Marseilles, using his relief organization as a cover for a hidden rescue operation which saved well-known artists, politicians, and scientists, including Marc Chagall and Heinrich Mann. In fact, part of the story is how Fry chose the few to save from all the desperate who lined up at his office. Along with the suspense of police raids and the gripping particulars about the brave rescuers on Fry’s team comes the knowledge that victims faced with extermination were not welcome in the U.S. The author begins with a brief overview of Hitler’s rise and the threat to the Jews, and then draws heavily on Fry’s autobiography and his letters home, which detail his increasing stress. Some readers will skip the details, but many will want all the amazing information about the unassuming hero who saved so many. Photos are scattered throughout, and source notes and bibliography are appended.
— Hazel Rochman
BOOKLIST


KIRKUS
At the behest of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization, journalist Varian Fry traveled to Marseilles, France, in the summer of 1940. His two-week mission was to find and rescue from the Nazis as many artists, authors and musicians as he could locate. They would need complex sets of travel documents, sometimes forged, and it became obvious that the job could never be accomplished in two weeks. Varian ended up spending over a year in France before he was forced to leave, ultimately rescuing more than 2,000 people. The effort cost him his marriage and his job. . .
Varian’s heroic story is fascinating . . .
KIRKUS

SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
Fry was a young American journalist working in pre-World War II Germany when he witnessed an anti-Semitic uprising led by storm troopers, and he was inspired, over 13 months of espionage and clandestine efforts during the war, to save people from impending annihilation. Back in New York City and following the French-German armistice in 1940 that provided Germany control over France, he realized that numerous renowned artists, writers, and scientists, both Jews and non-Jews, would be trapped under the Vichy government. Fry joined the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee and volunteered to lead an escape mission for as many of these refugees as possible. His work began as a one-man operation in Marseilles and quickly grew to a fully staffed unit posing as a refugee center. Fry not only helped the famous and talented, but also many ordinary Jews to escape France through Spain and Portugal and then to ports beyond. McClafferty describes an exciting if not daring and altruistic episode in this righteous gentile’s life. Numerous black-and-white photographs of the period and individuals who worked closely with Fry augment the readable and well-documented text. This is an intriguing look at how life completely changed for so many and how ingenuity and daring used by a few outwitted the enemy and saved lives.–Rita Soltan, Youth Services Consultant, West Bloomfield, MI
SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

ALAN
ASSEMBLY ON LITERATURE FOR ADOLESCENTS (ALAN), NCTE
ALAN Review Summer 2008 Article
Goodson, F Todd
In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry
Carla Killough McClafferty Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008, 208 pp., $19.95 History/​Nonfiction ISBN: 978-0-374-38204-9
In Defiance of Hitler offers an accessible and interesting presentation of the efforts of Varian Fry to help people escape the Holocaust. The narrative begins with Fry's observation of a racist mob in Berlin in July 1935 and continues through his life as a writer following the war.
This book is a valuable addition to sources about the Holocaust for young people. The book includes numerous black and white photographs from the period, and the narrative offers an insight to the conditions in occupied France and the methods Fry and his associates used to assist in the escape of Jews and Anti-Nazi French citizens. The text is accessible to adolescents, offering a detailed and accurate representation of historical events in a narrative style replete with compelling details. The book should be included in the libraries of all secondary schools, and the book provides a vivid example of an individual taking great personal risks on behalf of the needs of others.
F. Todd Goodson
Manhattan, KS
ALAN

Reviews for
Something Out of Nothing: Marie Curie and Radium

School Library Journal
***** STARRED REVIEW *****

*MCCLAFFERTY, Carla Killough. Something Out of Nothing: Marie Curie and Radium.
Gr 5-7-The author of The Head Bone's Connected to the Neck Bone: The Weird, Wacky and Wonderful X-Ray (Farrar, 2001) takes on a related topic with equal success in this profile of the driven scientist most closely associated with the discovery of radium. Born Manya Sklodowska and educated in her native Poland at a "Floating University" that operated in defiance of harsh Russian policies, Curie moved to Paris to continue her studies. There, both before and after the tragic death of her beloved, kindred spirit Pierre, she dedicated her life to pure research and enlisted her father-in-law to care for her children. She never took out patents, so even as she was rising to international fame, entrepreneurs worldwide began trumpeting wild claims for the healing benefits of radioactive products. McClafferty chronicles both that fad-and its dismal outcome, as the effects of long-term radiation poisoning slowly became horribly apparent. Noting that Curie maintained lifelong ties with her native land and also did significant medical work in WWI, the author follows her career to its final, illness-ridden days, then ends with an apt summation of her legacy. Archival photos and substantial multimedia resource lists enhance an engrossing study of a great scientist who tried to turn away from the world and ended up changing it profoundly.-John Peters, New York Public Library


Booklist

McClafferty, Carla Killough. Something Out of Nothing: Marie Curie and Radium.
Gr. 7-10. Like Nick Healy's overview, Marie Curie (2005), this readable biography examines Curie's life and work as a groundbreaking scientist and as an independent woman. Unlike Healy's, though, McClafferty's account is more detailed and includes extensive documentation with chapter source notes. The groundbreaking is as thrilling as the personal story, which describes Curie's struggle to get to college, her happy marriage to Pierre Curie and their work together, and her recognition as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, a prize she won again later for her work in chemistry. In addition to the triumph, though, McClafferty shows that Curie could be harsh and indifferent to her own family. The spacious design makes the text easy to read, and occasional photos, including one of the interior of the shed where she and Pierre began their groundbreaking work, bring the story closer to readers. --Hazel Rochman


Kirkus

An able biography tells, as the subtitle suggests, the stories of both Marie Curie and her famous discovery. After a précis of Curie's childhood that relies a little too much on daughter Eve's hagiography, the narrative settles, in measured fashion, on the great scientist's pioneering work, first with husband Pierre and then without. Liberal use of primary source material gives readers a terrific sense of Curie's state of mind as she worked and loved, archival illustrations taking them into the Curies' lab and notebooks. Later chapters intersperse the account of Curie's life with the meteoric rise and fall of the fortunes of radium, her most famous discovery, drawing heavily on both contemporary news coverage and advertising to demonstrate the near total embrace of radium as a cure-all. Accounts of groundbreaking radiation therapy give way to the travails of the "Radium Girls"-women whose repeated exposure to radium in the paint they used for glow-in-the-dark watches proved fatal. There are many biographies of Curie; this one stands out in its shared focus on her discovery and its legacy. (notes, bibliography, web sites, index) (Biography. 10-14)


The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (BCCB)

Perhaps no scientific career stands in greater contrast to that of Isaac Newton (see Krull, above) than that of Marie Curie. Newton experienced his annus mirabilis at twenty-four, the age at which Marie was finally able to enroll in college. While Newton worked as a sort of lone wolf, Marie and husband Pierre collaborated so closely they shared notebooks and carefully credited each other's efforts in their public lectures. While Newton hoarded his work, jealous of retaining appropriate credit for his discoveries, the Curies never patented their work, believing that the element radium was the "property" of humankind. In her smooth-moving text, McClafferty not only covers expected biographical data but also contrasts Curie's dedication to the study of radioactive elements with the exploitation of radium by the established medical community and a host of quacks and snake-oil salesmen as a silver-bullet cure for most ailments. As applications moved in advance of understanding, reputable scientists (the Curies included) as well as a gullible public freely placed themselves in the path of debilitating or even lethal exposure to radiation. Thus, biography melds here with social history to present Marie Curie as both shaper of and subject to the limits of early twentieth-century science. Generously illustrated with black-and-white photos, medical realia, and document reproductions, the volume also includes source notes, a selected bibliography, index, and annotated list of websites. EB