A Life Full of Quarks

"Heartbreaking and hilarious"--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“When I was young, I wanted to be a paleontologist, to unearth things both terrifying and long dead. I suppose this memoir is no different.”

John Chant grew up a lonely and brilliant boy swimming in a sea of science: his father an eccentric physics professor, his mother a former nuclear chemist, his older sister a pest and occasional Marxist, his ‘brother’ a robot, his pet a venomous lizard. In this darkly comic journey, positioned somewhere between science fiction, fabulation, and magical realism, John encounters dinosaurs, cosmic rays, alien astronauts, poets and atomic secrets, alcoholics and cancer victims, crackpots and Nobelists, brilliant, beguiling women, and an experimental chimpanzee.  He goes to a circus, a nuclear lab, graduate school, an underground lair, and eventually a faculty position at a spectacularly dysfunctional university. Through it all John explores the fantastical mysteries of the universe, including the biggest mystery of all: love.

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