Dr. Donald R. Maxwell holds two doctorates: one from the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Medicine) and more recently from the University of Michigan (French Literature), where he was Visiting Assistant Professor and Lecturer in French. Before retirement from his scientific career, he was Senior Vice President for R & D at a major US corporation. In addition to numerous scientific publications, Dr. Maxwell is the author of The Abacus and the Rainbow: Bergson, Proust and the Digital-Analogic Opposition, and Science and Literature: The Divergent Cultures of Discovery and Creation.
2006 0-7734-5863-8 This memoir is a sequel to the author’s A Journey from Wartime Europe to Self-Discovery (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). It describes the author’s years at Cambridge, from arrival as a nervous schoolboy to leaving as a physics tutor and medical researcher. After his Cambridge doctorate, the author returns to Paris, the city of his birth and early youth. He obtains an appointment at the Radium Institute (now Curie Institute), lives at the Cité Universitaire and experiences the life and culture of Paris and post-WWII French science. After marriage to a French music student, he accepts an invitation to return to England and take up a research appointment there. Some years later, pharmacological work on prostaglandins, potent substances with a variety of physiological actions, leads to a research collaboration with Japanese and American groups and eventually to an appointment in the area of New Jersey that is prominent in the author’s first book. The work emphasizes the differences in the lifestyles of the three countries. It will appeal to readers of the author’s first memoir as well as to students of the culture of science.