A well-informed deep dive into genius.
Biographies of five of history’s greatest minds.
Atalay, an artist and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, explores the lives of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, Newton, and Einstein. Readers will enjoy his account of their accomplishments, accompanied by portraits of rival immortals who didn’t make the cut. To justify his choices, Atalay muses about genius itself, emphasizing that prodigies tend to be eccentric, difficult, and even mentally ill. He divides geniuses into three categories. Ordinary geniuses “follow the rugged topography of logic…to reach the summit of their remarkable achievements.” They are surpassed by the magicians, who study on their own and “gain the erudition that will shake the intellectual world.” Transcending even them are transformative geniuses, who “appear to leap from one summit to another, their creative efforts altogether redefining existing disciplines.” Atalay has no doubt that his five transformers represent the peak of human achievement. His biographies of the chosen five (and many competing geniuses) are only the tips of the iceberg. Delving deeply into each man’s work, he investigates the science behind the art and the art behind the science. Art-supply stores did not exist until the 19th century, so artists mixed pigments from scratch and often made their own tools. All were well versed in mathematics, which shaped their use of perspective, the proportions of their figures, and, for composers, the structure of their compositions. The basics of Newton’s and Einstein’s laws are not difficult to explain, as Dennis Overbye and Abraham Pais have proven with books on Einstein, and Michael White and James Gleick with equally fine assessments of Newton. Ataley’s detailed descriptions, by contrast, may overwhelm readers not familiar with college physics, although his digressions into phrenology, Einstein’s brain, geniuses' physical maladies, and rankings of various sorts of greatness throughout history are entertaining and modestly enlightening.
A well-informed deep dive into genius.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781639364893
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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