A delightful, detailed chronicle of great men (and a rare woman) whose fascination with the night sky and the technology...
Photography, not computers, ushered in modern astronomy. Here, its bumpy evolution is in the expert hands of Harvard College Observatory associate Hirshfeld (Physics/Univ. of Mass. Dartmouth; Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes, 2009, etc.).
In this highly illuminating history, the author “explores the decades-long bridge of innovation that transformed Victorian-era visual astronomy into the scientific discipline that is observational astrophysics.” Although revolutionary when it appeared around 1600, the telescope is simply an amazing extension of the eye, not designed to function in dim lighting or make a permanent record. The daguerreotype dazzled the world in 1839, and an early photograph of the moon, unimpressive by modern standards, created a sensation in 1851, but stars and planets remained off limits until film sensitivity vastly increased with the dry plate in the 1870s. Equally essential to astronomers was the simultaneous maturing of the spectroscope. Splitting light into innumerable hues and lines, it allowed not only the discovery that stars were similar to the sun, but also the identification of their precise chemical makeup and movements. By the 1880s, “what had been a noisome, exasperating art had become a predictable mainstream technology that would eventually recast the telescope as an adjunct of the camera” and spectroscope. Until that decade, Hirshfeld emphasizes brilliant but now-unknown amateurs (Andrew Common, William Bond, William Huggins, Isaac Roberts) who fell in love with astronomy and had no objection to the clunky new technology. Afterward, they were replaced by academically trained but equally obsessive scientists who oversaw the creation of the massive 20th-century observatories (George Ellery Hale) and revealed an unimaginably immense, expanding universe (Edwin Hubble, Harlow Shapley).
A delightful, detailed chronicle of great men (and a rare woman) whose fascination with the night sky and the technology necessary to study it led to today’s dramatic discoveries.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-934137-78-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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