Strong portrait of an unsung innovator, an intellectual meteor that struck the world of geology and sent it slowly spinning.
Natural sciences journalist Cutler crafts a solid biography of 17th-century scientific original and restless religious conservative Nicholas Steno.
When, in 1668, Steno produced a little 78-page tome that forwarded the idea of superposition (which eventually became the science of stratigraphy) and went a long way toward explaining just how those shells came to be on mountaintops, he was not coming out of nowhere, writes Cutler. He was already renowned for his discoveries as an anatomist and had been invited by Grand Duke Ferdinand de’ Medici to work at his academy in Florence, becoming an important element in the post-Galilean ascendancy of experimentation and direct observation. Cutler explains how Steno fit into an age of intellectual ferment, doubt, and subversiveness, why he let his research follow its own muse, why neither the realm of eternal forms nor spontaneous generation satisfied him as scientific explanations. As well, Cutler settles Steno on the intellectual timeline that made valuable contributions to earth science, including the work of the Pre-Socratics, the Brothers of Purity, Leonardo, Avicenna, Robert Hooke, and John Woodward (who had an unfortunate tendency toward plagiarism). Cutler handles the scientific material with a sure hand and tackles with eagerness the importance of cross-fertilization as much as conflict in the church/science relationship. And though he is treading in the world of intense emotions when it comes to explaining why Steno took a “blind leap into the infinite” by converting to Catholicism, his comments have the ring of truth because Cutler sticks to his subject’s written words and doesn’t parade his own spiritual notions. Steno’s later years—he vowed poverty and self-denial and died in his mid-40s—play out against church corruption and lay indifference, with science a memory seemingly as distant in time as his fossils.
Strong portrait of an unsung innovator, an intellectual meteor that struck the world of geology and sent it slowly spinning.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-525-94708-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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