“Seldom has history been so inextricably intertwined with the history of science,” comments Guedj. And seldom have such...
After his fine romp-cum-history-of-mathematics (The Parrot’s Theorem, p. 889), Guedj brings us another science-novel, this one set during the French Revolution and telling how the metric system came to be.
Based on reason (and wild excesses of same), the Revolution occurred in an age that craved the universal, ideal, and absolute. Little wonder, then—when “seven or eight hundred different units of measurement” were in use—that the revolutionists set out not just to end the monarchy but to unify weights and measures once and for all. Nor is it surprising, either, that they based their thinking not on something artificial or made up, but that “they chose the earth itself as the standard—the earth, shared by all men, invariable, and universal.” In short, they would measure the earth’s quarter meridian, divide by ten million, and—presto!—the meter would exist. With scrupulous detail and passionate attentiveness, Guedj follows the two scientists appointed to the huge task of measurement—Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delembre—as they go on their individual six-year odysseys, one starting in Barcelona and measuring north, the other in Dunkirk and measuring south. These real-life scientists will indefatigably climb mountains and bell towers to take endless sightings with the newly invented and incredibly accurate “repeating circle”; will be imprisoned, threatened by mobs, struck by injury—and even persecuted by the Terror itself during their 1792–98 labors, all the while discoursing with the likes of Lavoisier, Condorcet, Borda, d’Alembert, and Laplace. Patience can be helpful as the increments of narrative tick by, but rewards are plentiful, too, in seeing the Revolution, for example, from these scientists’ unusual vantage, or in living through the nightmarish possibility that the entire great project might crumble due to a single mismeasurement back at the very beginning.
“Seldom has history been so inextricably intertwined with the history of science,” comments Guedj. And seldom have such interesting books as his come from that union.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-226-31030-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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