A deep immersion into geometric determinism at its most entertaining.
A lively explanation of how geometry structures aspects of the natural and human worlds.
In this bracingly enthusiastic account of geometry’s role in shaping a variety of institutions, Alexander (History/UCLA; Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, 2014, etc.) turns to Euclid’s Elements and its complete world of mathematical proofs, founded on indisputable postulates and proven through impeccable logic. (The book isn’t overrun with mathematics, but when it is unavoidable, the author is clear in his language.) Geometry revealed truths stripped of anything erroneous, unessential, and transitory, truths that were deployed by such luminaries as Copernicus, Galileo, and Leon Battista Alberti, setting the scientific agenda. Geometry is everywhere, underlying the natural and human-made worlds, infusing even our social arrangements. Guided by the art and architectural works of Alberti, which demonstrated “that the seemingly limitless variety one encounters in nature was in fact governed by the fixed eternal laws of geometry,” Alexander applies that thought to the royal gardens of, in particular, France. Gardens were central to the monarchy’s public presentation, ideology, identity, power, and legitimacy, especially so at Versailles, where Louis XIV’s hierarchical state was reflected in the layout of the vast but tightly ordered gardens. “At the apex of this universe was, inevitably, the king in his palace, whose rule was as inescapable and unchallengeable as geometry itself,” writes the author. This modernizing state was governed by a rational and efficient central bureaucracy, which is how the story moves forward beyond the monarchy into city planning. “The geometrical ideal of an efficient rational state found expression…on the bustling streets of capital cities—the homes of state bureaucracies.” This is the case in Rome, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, where harmony and order reflect the organs of state. The stamp of Versailles can also be found in New Delhi and Washington, D.C., the latter being a fine example of geometry accommodating several nodes of power.
A deep immersion into geometric determinism at its most entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-25490-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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