A well-informed deep dive into genius.
Biographies of five of history’s greatest minds.
Atalay, an artist and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, explores the lives of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, Newton, and Einstein. Readers will enjoy his account of their accomplishments, accompanied by portraits of rival immortals who didn’t make the cut. To justify his choices, Atalay muses about genius itself, emphasizing that prodigies tend to be eccentric, difficult, and even mentally ill. He divides geniuses into three categories. Ordinary geniuses “follow the rugged topography of logic…to reach the summit of their remarkable achievements.” They are surpassed by the magicians, who study on their own and “gain the erudition that will shake the intellectual world.” Transcending even them are transformative geniuses, who “appear to leap from one summit to another, their creative efforts altogether redefining existing disciplines.” Atalay has no doubt that his five transformers represent the peak of human achievement. His biographies of the chosen five (and many competing geniuses) are only the tips of the iceberg. Delving deeply into each man’s work, he investigates the science behind the art and the art behind the science. Art-supply stores did not exist until the 19th century, so artists mixed pigments from scratch and often made their own tools. All were well versed in mathematics, which shaped their use of perspective, the proportions of their figures, and, for composers, the structure of their compositions. The basics of Newton’s and Einstein’s laws are not difficult to explain, as Dennis Overbye and Abraham Pais have proven with books on Einstein, and Michael White and James Gleick with equally fine assessments of Newton. Ataley’s detailed descriptions, by contrast, may overwhelm readers not familiar with college physics, although his digressions into phrenology, Einstein’s brain, geniuses' physical maladies, and rankings of various sorts of greatness throughout history are entertaining and modestly enlightening.
A well-informed deep dive into genius.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781639364893
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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