A readable, enjoyable contribution to the history of science.
Four scientists collaborate in the quest to understand the heavens.
In the 1500s, there was scant cooperation among scholars of different countries: Books and papers were slow to travel, and great discoveries sometimes remained unrecognized for decades. Computer scientist Fauber focuses on four founding fathers of modern astronomy who sought each other out and advanced some central ideas in what was then an act of heresy. Copernicus was the forerunner in a time when “there was no place named ‘America,’ no light bulbs, no vaccines, no nationalism, no cheap steel, no secular state, no accurate clocks…and almost no books.” Working with such tools as he had, he advanced a thesis that boldly stated that Earth is not the center of the universe and that “all the spheres revolve around the Sun,” a heliocentric notion that put him at odds with the Catholic Church in a time of schism. Figuring in the story in roughly equal measure are three other scientists who pushed the “Copernican heresy” further: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo Galilei. The story of their discoveries, aided by primitive telescopes, mathematical intuitions, and long letters back and forth, is well known; what Fauber does well is humanize these four residents of the pantheon of science. An overweening letter from Brahe to Kepler, for instance, opened the door to a personal visit, although Kepler scrawled in the margin, “Everyone loves themself!” Brahe was a strange man, though, as Fauber shows, not without reason: He had been kidnapped as a baby and raised “in splendid isolation by a boorish uncle and his coy wife”; Galileo’s mother “stole from him, spied on him, and fought with Marina, mother of his children.” The writing is sometimes a touch too casual—Galileo, writes the author, was born “too early to see the lax republican model of Venetian government spread over Europe like jam on toast”—but the story is seldom less than fascinating.
A readable, enjoyable contribution to the history of science.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64-313204-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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