“I think, therefore I am” is only the beginning of the story.
The work of the French rationalist is best understood within the politics of the 17th century, as cogently presented here for the non-philosopher.
Born in 1596, Descartes reached adulthood at the start of the Thirty Years’ War, the bloody European conflict rooted in religious clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Born Catholic and educated in the Jesuit tradition, Descartes spent some time seeking a suitable career—perhaps as lawyer, perhaps as engineer. As the latter, he traveled throughout Europe as a military consultant, although Grayling suggests provocatively that Descartes may have served as a spy. The discovery of clandestine activities, the author argues, may explain why Descartes absconded to the Netherlands (tolerant and out-of-the-way) in 1628 and began his purely intellectual investigations. Yet, in the charged atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, to be a man of science was no small risk. A decade earlier, Galileo had been excommunicated for publishing evidence supporting the Copernican model of the solar system. Descartes, mindful of these difficulties and a devout Catholic, sought to separate matters of faith from matters of reason. For the scientific revolution to continue, he needed to wipe the slate clean and start over, and thus he conceived his Method of Doubt. Much of his life in the Netherlands was taken up with the careful and measured working out of his ideas on mathematics, logic, optics, physics, medicine and many other areas of rational inquiry. He also slept ten hours a day, lingering in bed until noon, and had an affinity for cross-eyed women. After the publication of his work, Descartes was arrogant to a fault in defending his ideas. Perhaps too vain in later years, his commission to personally tutor the Queen of Sweden led to his death from pneumonia one Scandinavian winter.
“I think, therefore I am” is only the beginning of the story.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1501-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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