Scientific history fluently recounted—just the thing for would-be alchemists.
Cracking the mysteries of the universe can get a person in trouble. Witness Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, the twin subjects of this lively study.
Jackson (Leavenworth Train, 2001, etc.) opens with the chance meeting of the two scientists, one English, the other French, who sized each other up and then renewed the race to solve a puzzle: “What was invisible, yet all around them? Nowhere, but everywhere?” Priestley, an utterly remarkable English thinker and putterer who wrote more than 150 books on everything from politics to grammar to physics, had been experimenting with the composition of air and had come to the conclusion that it was not made up of just one thing, but an unknown number of somethings, a mixture of some sort. A couple of years before the meeting, Priestley had busily been discovering gases, “more new gases . . . than any other man before,” coincidentally determining a method for quantifying air quality. Lavoisier, no less remarkable, was a tax collector who spent his spare time studying the process of burning, sure that the truth of the matter lay in “dancing flames and terrible destruction.” Both retired to their separate laboratories and worked at revolutionizing 18th-century physics and chemistry, Priestley cultivating correspondence and friendship with the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier working in such isolation and secrecy (despite encouraging visits from Priestley) that he was chided for his uncollegial omissions and mistakes by the French Academy. Still, it was Lavoisier who eventually divined some notion of the chemical processes at work, realizing that many different elements existed, as opposed to Priestley’s view that “all substances were ultimately made of the same stuff, just differently arranged.” In the end, the times swallowed both up: Lavoisier fell afoul of the Terror, assigned to the guillotine, while Priestley fled England for his unorthodox political and religious views.
Scientific history fluently recounted—just the thing for would-be alchemists.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03434-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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