Very slow-moving, but informative.
A biography of the only mapmaker nonspecialists are likely to have heard of.
Mercator (1512–94) was born in Flanders as Gerard de Cremer, Latinizing his name, as did many learned men of his day. British historian Taylor (God's Fugitive, 1999) begins with a summary of the state of geography in the early 16th century, built, as it was, on such ancient authorities as Ptolemy but incorporating recent discoveries in the Americas and Asia. Mercator, he believes, was drawn to geography and cartography as disciplines that combined classical knowledge with the heady news being brought by returning adventurers to port cities all over Europe. At the same time, a good mapmaker could make a great deal of money by supplying the rich and powerful with accurate maps and globes. In Mercator’s case, even at the apprentice stage of his career, his craftsmanship set him apart. By age 30, he was doing commissions for clients ranging from Spain’s Charles V to the Turkish Sultan: maps of England, Lorraine, and Europe; atlases; and matched pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes. For all, he drew on the most current information he could gather, whether Copernicus’s sky maps or documents from the recent English Arctic expeditions. His careful courtship of the powerful stood him in good stead even when, in 1543, for reasons Taylor can only speculate on, he fell afoul of the Inquisition. On his release, he moved to Duisberg, in Cleves, where for the rest of his life he managed to avoid the bitter religious conflicts sweeping Europe. In 1569, he produced his masterpiece: a large (53 x 84 inches) world map based on the cylindrical projection that has become permanently associated with his name. Taylor methodically fills in the details both of Mercator’s career and its historical context, and he concludes by arguing that Mercator was, on the whole, a true scientist despite the limitations his era imposed on him.
Very slow-moving, but informative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1377-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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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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