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
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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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