An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history.
How a legendary poet and an iconic scientist shared a vision of enchanted life.
In this adventurous study, literature professor Bergland pairs Dickinson and Darwin to chart a profound transitional stage in Western intellectual history: a shift toward the separation of scientific and artistic perspectives. The author demonstrates how both figures rejected this shift, and their scrupulously attentive considerations of the natural world affirmed the presence of mysterious, awe-inspiring energies and interconnections. Bergland skillfully outlines the intellectual contexts in which both produced their masterworks and draws out affinities among their core assumptions. The author’s close reading of a number of Dickinson’s poems places them in relation to her advanced scientific knowledge and awareness of Darwinian theory, and the author argues convincingly that a good deal of Dickinson’s writing can profitably be interpreted “as part of a conversation with Darwin and his interlocutors.” This approach results in an often engaging decoding of the poet’s more obscure allusions and helps us understand the significance to her writing of a sense of the final unity of all life. Also rewarding is Bergland’s commentary on the resistance to Darwin’s ideas among scientists, theologians, and laypeople and on his passionate response to observing natural wonders. Some of the author’s attempts to draw out intriguing parallels between the two figures are strained—as in her commentary on some of their personal habits and the trajectory of their creative output—but she makes a strong case for the intellectual commonalities between them. Bergland is compelling in her suggestion that “Darwin’s and Dickinson’s voices can help us recover our sense of ecological meaning,” for “their lives and works whisper to each other and to us, telling us of the natural magic at the roots of our green world.”
An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780691235288
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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