A creative, engaging, and profoundly moving account of a man’s fierce desire to discover, understand, and preserve.
A historian and literary critic offers a unique and revealing look at the life of English philosopher John Aubrey (1626-1697), told in Aubrey’s voice in the form of a diary.
Scurr (History and Politics/Cambridge Univ.; Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 2006) has hit upon a compelling narrative device. Although she has traditional introductory and closing chapters, the bulk of the biography deals with the quotidian affairs of Aubrey, who was a friend and/or acquaintance of some of the great early Enlightenment names, including Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke (with whom Aubrey often hung out in coffee shops, new to London), Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, and numerous others. Aubrey also lived during some of the most tempestuous times in English history—Charles I, Cromwell, the Restoration, the Great Fire of London, the ascent of William and Mary, the unspeakable violence practiced upon Roman Catholics: Aubrey wrote about all of it. Scurr also shows us, through Aubrey’s work, the birth and growth of science in England, including Hooke’s contention that Newton had stolen his ideas. As the author notes, Aubrey was obsessed with English history and geography. He did massive, detailed studies of the countryside (including Stonehenge), studies not duly credited until centuries later. But among the delights of Scurr’s account are the practices and beliefs that conflicted with the emerging science of his day—e.g., witchcraft, astrology, and primitive medicine (Aubrey recommended egg white and sugar to palliate/cure gonorrhea). We also witness Aubrey’s struggles with finances (he frequently borrowed from Hooke), his internecine struggles with his brother, his failures in love (one woman he’d hoped to marry took him not to the altar but to court—more than once), his aches and pains, and his moods.
A creative, engaging, and profoundly moving account of a man’s fierce desire to discover, understand, and preserve.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-042-2
Page Count: 552
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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