by James Gleick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2003
Engaging, concise biography of a monumental visionary and eccentric whose life was as remarkable as the universe he...
Science author and journalist Gleick (Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, 1999, etc.) traces with equal measures of irony and sympathy the life of an Enlightenment icon as notable for misery, backbiting, paranoia, deceit, and greed as brilliance.
Fatherless, left in the care of his grandparents for eight years, young Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was so maladjusted that he threatened to torch the house of his mother and stepfather with them inside. His schoolmaster and uncle rescued him from life on the farm by getting him admitted to Trinity College at Cambridge. In 1666, when the college was stricken by plague, he returned home and embarked on his landmark mathematical studies. Yet his magnum opus, Principia (1687), came only after years of half-hints to scientific colleagues and controversies over plagiarism. Gleick spends much effort elaborating how Newton followed up on imperfectly intuited hypotheses by Galileo and Descartes to derive laws related to gravitation, inertia, planetary motion, and optics. But inevitably the focus shifts to how this loveless, largely friendless man tried to peer into the heart of the world’s mysteries. Unable to purge “occult, hidden, mystical qualities from his vision of nature,” the scientist’s research encompassed not just mathematics but also two more disreputable covert enterprises: alchemy and unorthodox scriptural interpretation. Newton evinced “implacable ruthlessness” toward scientists Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, John Flamsteed, and Gottfried Leibniz. Hair and clothing askew, he scratched diagrams with his stick in the walkways of Trinity and, as the half-century mark approached, experienced a nervous breakdown. In his last three decades, he grew rich as the college’s Warden and later Master of the Mint. For all his faults, Gleick notes, Newton’s legacy is clear: “He bequeathed to science, that institution in its throes of birth, a research program, practical and open-ended.”
Engaging, concise biography of a monumental visionary and eccentric whose life was as remarkable as the universe he struggled to understand. (16 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42233-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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