“Seldom has history been so inextricably intertwined with the history of science,” comments Guedj. And seldom have such...
After his fine romp-cum-history-of-mathematics (The Parrot’s Theorem, p. 889), Guedj brings us another science-novel, this one set during the French Revolution and telling how the metric system came to be.
Based on reason (and wild excesses of same), the Revolution occurred in an age that craved the universal, ideal, and absolute. Little wonder, then—when “seven or eight hundred different units of measurement” were in use—that the revolutionists set out not just to end the monarchy but to unify weights and measures once and for all. Nor is it surprising, either, that they based their thinking not on something artificial or made up, but that “they chose the earth itself as the standard—the earth, shared by all men, invariable, and universal.” In short, they would measure the earth’s quarter meridian, divide by ten million, and—presto!—the meter would exist. With scrupulous detail and passionate attentiveness, Guedj follows the two scientists appointed to the huge task of measurement—Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delembre—as they go on their individual six-year odysseys, one starting in Barcelona and measuring north, the other in Dunkirk and measuring south. These real-life scientists will indefatigably climb mountains and bell towers to take endless sightings with the newly invented and incredibly accurate “repeating circle”; will be imprisoned, threatened by mobs, struck by injury—and even persecuted by the Terror itself during their 1792–98 labors, all the while discoursing with the likes of Lavoisier, Condorcet, Borda, d’Alembert, and Laplace. Patience can be helpful as the increments of narrative tick by, but rewards are plentiful, too, in seeing the Revolution, for example, from these scientists’ unusual vantage, or in living through the nightmarish possibility that the entire great project might crumble due to a single mismeasurement back at the very beginning.
“Seldom has history been so inextricably intertwined with the history of science,” comments Guedj. And seldom have such interesting books as his come from that union.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-226-31030-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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