The result is a charming tale that will prompt interested readers to pursue Châtelet’s contributions to scientific thought.
Breezy treatment of the intellectually fecund romance between the Enlightenment’s most notorious man of letters and an aristocratic French scientist.
Bodanis has proved himself terrifically adept at rendering complex subjects in language palatable to the non-scholar with such works as E=mc2 (2000), and here he amicably develops one of history’s more remarkable and significant marriages of the minds. Freethinking Voltaire, whose early forced exile to England helped instill his Enlightenment ideals, met the charming young and married Emilie du Châtelet in 1733, just as he was putting together his incendiary Letters on England. They quickly became inseparable lovers. Châtelet was no trifling mistress, but an accomplished, well-educated mathematician and scientist whose early admiration for Descartes goaded her to explore further the mysterious forces that moved the universe, specifically the theory of gravity propounded by Sir Isaac Newton. Constantly in trouble for his writing, and two steps ahead of the irate king’s officials bearing lettres de cachet for his imprisonment in the Bastille, Voltaire needed a safe house. He and Châtelet ensconced themselves with her children and servants at Cirey, a crumbling old château 150 miles east of Paris, in the Champagne region that belonged to her husband’s obliging family. Châtelet was ecstatic to find a refuge from the strictures of being a wife and mother, a place where she could undertake serious research and finally be encouraged and recognized in her intellectual pursuits. Voltaire drew on her brilliance to hone his own ideas; Zadig emerged from this period. Bodanis draws on reams of correspondence in portraying an idyllic partnership that smoldered over a decade and proved the enduring love of both their lives: “One writes verse in his corner,” observed one visitor to Cirey, “the other triangles in hers.”
The result is a charming tale that will prompt interested readers to pursue Châtelet’s contributions to scientific thought.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23720-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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