A terrific work, notable for its gravity and humor, scholarship and popular appeal. (Illustrations throughout)
The little-known life of a gifted but cranky associate of Christopher Wren and bitter rival of Isaac Newton.
Jardine’s is the first full-scale portrait since 1956 of the cantankerous Hooke (1635–1703), a member of the Royal Society, co-restorer with Wren of London after the Great Fire of 1666, extraordinarily gifted inventor, designer, builder, artist, and scientist. The author begins with the most controversial of all of Hooke’s professional disputes, his argument with Newton about who should be credited for discovering the inverse square law of gravitational attraction. Hooke clearly had the insight, says Jardine (Renaissance Studies/Queen Mary Univ., London; On a Grander Scale, 2002, etc.), but not the mathematics to prove it, and so he wrote to Newton, who proved the theory and consequently soared into celebrity. Hooke gnashed his teeth publicly and privately for years afterward. The narrative then turns back to Hooke’s boyhood on the Isle of Wight, subsequently moving through his schooling in London and Oxford, his election to the Royal Society in 1663, and his incredibly busy career as an inventor, a presenter of weekly experiments for the edification of Society members, a professor of geometry at Gresham College, a writer, illustrator, experimenter—he enjoyed his tests with cannabis—and advocate for friends trying to publish their own works. Though he had a brief sexual relationship with a servant woman, Hooke never married and died miserably alone. Jardine carefully reconstructs her subject’s amazing career from diaries, correspondence, and public records. She most eloquently demonstrates that he and Wren should be jointly credited for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and convinces as well that Hooke’s irascible temperament, his tendency to take on more work than he could possibly finish, and his unprepossessing looks have consigned him to his current position as the forgotten runner-up to his more celebrated coevals.
A terrific work, notable for its gravity and humor, scholarship and popular appeal. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053897-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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