An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history.
How a legendary poet and an iconic scientist shared a vision of enchanted life.
In this adventurous study, literature professor Bergland pairs Dickinson and Darwin to chart a profound transitional stage in Western intellectual history: a shift toward the separation of scientific and artistic perspectives. The author demonstrates how both figures rejected this shift, and their scrupulously attentive considerations of the natural world affirmed the presence of mysterious, awe-inspiring energies and interconnections. Bergland skillfully outlines the intellectual contexts in which both produced their masterworks and draws out affinities among their core assumptions. The author’s close reading of a number of Dickinson’s poems places them in relation to her advanced scientific knowledge and awareness of Darwinian theory, and the author argues convincingly that a good deal of Dickinson’s writing can profitably be interpreted “as part of a conversation with Darwin and his interlocutors.” This approach results in an often engaging decoding of the poet’s more obscure allusions and helps us understand the significance to her writing of a sense of the final unity of all life. Also rewarding is Bergland’s commentary on the resistance to Darwin’s ideas among scientists, theologians, and laypeople and on his passionate response to observing natural wonders. Some of the author’s attempts to draw out intriguing parallels between the two figures are strained—as in her commentary on some of their personal habits and the trajectory of their creative output—but she makes a strong case for the intellectual commonalities between them. Bergland is compelling in her suggestion that “Darwin’s and Dickinson’s voices can help us recover our sense of ecological meaning,” for “their lives and works whisper to each other and to us, telling us of the natural magic at the roots of our green world.”
An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780691235288
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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