The result is a charming tale that will prompt interested readers to pursue Châtelet’s contributions to scientific thought.
Breezy treatment of the intellectually fecund romance between the Enlightenment’s most notorious man of letters and an aristocratic French scientist.
Bodanis has proved himself terrifically adept at rendering complex subjects in language palatable to the non-scholar with such works as E=mc2 (2000), and here he amicably develops one of history’s more remarkable and significant marriages of the minds. Freethinking Voltaire, whose early forced exile to England helped instill his Enlightenment ideals, met the charming young and married Emilie du Châtelet in 1733, just as he was putting together his incendiary Letters on England. They quickly became inseparable lovers. Châtelet was no trifling mistress, but an accomplished, well-educated mathematician and scientist whose early admiration for Descartes goaded her to explore further the mysterious forces that moved the universe, specifically the theory of gravity propounded by Sir Isaac Newton. Constantly in trouble for his writing, and two steps ahead of the irate king’s officials bearing lettres de cachet for his imprisonment in the Bastille, Voltaire needed a safe house. He and Châtelet ensconced themselves with her children and servants at Cirey, a crumbling old château 150 miles east of Paris, in the Champagne region that belonged to her husband’s obliging family. Châtelet was ecstatic to find a refuge from the strictures of being a wife and mother, a place where she could undertake serious research and finally be encouraged and recognized in her intellectual pursuits. Voltaire drew on her brilliance to hone his own ideas; Zadig emerged from this period. Bodanis draws on reams of correspondence in portraying an idyllic partnership that smoldered over a decade and proved the enduring love of both their lives: “One writes verse in his corner,” observed one visitor to Cirey, “the other triangles in hers.”
The result is a charming tale that will prompt interested readers to pursue Châtelet’s contributions to scientific thought.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23720-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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