Often slow going, but worth the effort.
The life and times of Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, the “father of modern medicine.”
Ball (Critical Mass, 2004, etc.) is interested more in the ideological milieu of the Renaissance than in his subject’s medical career. For good reason: Renaissance medicine was no science. Paracelsus (1493–1541) did favor experience over authority, but even his “reforms” did not go much beyond the witch-doctor stage. Still, he lived in a time when the medieval synthesis was falling apart and did his best to accelerate the process. Son of a village doctor in Switzerland, Paracelsus learned the usual Latin, grammar and rhetoric, but gained more practical knowledge when his father moved to an Austrian mining town where the boy studied metallurgy, later the foundation of his alchemical lore. Early medicine incorporated alchemy and astrology, both changing rapidly after the 15th-century influx of Greek and Arabic knowledge into Europe. Ball surveys both fields, showing what Paracelsus built on as well as what he replaced with his own theories. (Not always an easy distinction to make, given his love of neologisms.) Paracelsus’s idiosyncrasies put him at odds with both the Catholic Church and its emergent Lutheran critics. His vehement opposition to traditional doctors inevitably brought him into conflict with the locals (portraits usually show him wearing a sword), and as a result he led a wandering life, never marrying. The author carefully explains Paracelsus’s theories, clearly showing how he broke with medieval practice, but avoids the temptation to make him a pioneering modern where he is not. A true iconoclast, he inhabited an ideological landscape somewhere between the medieval and the modern. Ball effectively places Paracelsus in the larger context of Renaissance magic and philosophy, and of a turbulent period.
Often slow going, but worth the effort.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-22979-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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