Another rich, readable examination of the intersections where culture and science meet from a scrupulous historian who never...
Arresting account of the career of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)—scientist, political polemicist, preacher, radical and friend of the American and French revolutions.
The subtitle is no throwaway: Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, 2006, etc.) takes a close look at what in Priestley’s time were the overlapping domains of science, religion and politics. He notes, for example, that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were Priestley’s friends, applied the principle of reason to the most serious questions of the time, an approach that ignited decades of revolution and backlash. Priestley’s radical views eventually forced him into exile after an angry mob burned and destroyed his home and laboratory in 1791. He died in America, his friendship with Jefferson deepening in his final years. Johnson opens the book with the image of waterspouts viewed by Priestley aboard the ship bringing him to America; the author revisits this image later when he compares waterspouts to mobs of marauding humans. Johnson examines Priestley’s great strengths, among them his curiosity about the plainest things in view, which were often the most unexplainable. He also notes that Priestley came along at a most propitious time. Scientific equipment was becoming more sophisticated, enabling him to conduct his foundational experiments with oxygen, while the improving English economy and a supportive spouse provided him with essential leisure. Johnson employs his customary digressiveness to great effect, with asides on the importance of coffee to the Enlightenment, on the significance of England’s vast coal deposits, and on Lavoisier’s improvements of the French gunpowder that powered the American Revolution. Priestley questioned religious mysticism, the magical view of Jesus and the worship of saints and relics, the author notes, but never abandoned his fundamental belief in God.
Another rich, readable examination of the intersections where culture and science meet from a scrupulous historian who never offers easy answers to troubling, perhaps intractable questions.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-852-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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