This very readable and forthright autobiography covers the first 26 years of life of one of the leading American molecular biologists. The rich fabric of its story is told in part in beautiful letters. His recollections reflect both, a lifetime of incisive analysis and the mellow philosophical perspective of a septuagenarian. This multifaceted memoir can be read at varying levels of depth, reaching from the unencumbered experience of a middleschool student to the sophistication of a postgraduate, and it adresses a multitude of aspects of social and intellectual life. Though chockful with historical detail, it presents common and personal occurrences and opinions with humor, irony, even satire, and it is at least in parts breathtakingly thrilling. The first part of the book describes the author's upbringing in a partially assimilated, reform Jewish family. Starting out as an unexpected and spoiled addition to two older siblings, Stent evokes the social and cultural life enjoyed by well-to-do femilies in the German capital Berlin during the 1920s Weimar regime. Bereft by the tragic illness and death of his doting mother, the boy is increasingly consternated, isolated and frightened by the rapidly unfolding official anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, and he is imprinted with the terror of the Nuremberg progromes and the 1938 Kristallnacht. With father and siblings already abroad, the 14-year-old and his stepmother embark on a dangerous, illegal escape that leads them to safety. Having finally reached Chicago, the adolescent, essentially on his own and pitifully poor, completes his schooling and strives for a college education. The cultural change left him totally unprepared for dealing with coeds, in whom he is now greatly interested. He starts out more or less undetermined in his search for a woman and a career, and he learns to grab and eventually finagle opportunities. As member of a government technical branch, he returns in 1947 to Germany and his beloved , now war-torn Berlin, but having the power of both an American uniform and American cigarettes. Back home in the US, he struggles with the excitement and intellectual challenge of reseaarch, its potential fame, and the parternalistic sociality inherent in a research career. The latter's cost is deferment of a mature sex and love life. This dilemma and his racial victimization affirm his self-perception as a "lucky self-hater." Despite his passionate sexuality, he is in his relationships with women enotionally unresponsive, undecided, or at times (he says) a cad. Unwittingly, he victimizes the "other" but, in the final analysis, again himself. The last part of the book sets forth the beginnings of molecular biology, in which Stent participated as an early member of Max Delbrueck's groupon bacteriphage research. Though lacking literature references, the book's historical data appear to have been verified during the author's 1985-1991 research fellowships. Stent's autobiography is more thoughtful than James Watson's "The Double Helix," of which Stent has been a renown critic. Stent perceives science as a sociocultural activity and addresses both its lofty ideals and its flaws. A major topic is anti-Semitism and the arrogance that feeds into it. Stent conveys to his readers an understanding of its many faces and of the sociocultural evil of any racism. By pointing out the splinter in his own, the victim's, eye, he proves that it is humanly almost impossible to be totally free from racism. Biophysicist Stent does not embrace the reductionism prevailing in molecular biology. He seems to warn of its dangers to the emotional development and humanization of budding scientists. Knowing that modern physics contradicts the subject-object separation time-honored in biological thinking, he commits himself in his memoir to being both. My favorite piquantery among the many in his recollections is a play with an allusion of his first name with Wagner's Gunther. It leads to a summary, rather self-deprecating evaluation of his scientific merits (pp.15-16). Scientific papers begin customarily with a summary of the salient points: here, the image of the great "hero" scientist will be rejected. Rather, Stent wants to be perceived, warts and all, as the protagonist of his bittersweet story.