Carefully considered portrait of a true Renaissance man—polemics and all.
The painter’s true greatness was as a scientist.
So says Capra (The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, 2004, etc.), who begins by noting that Leonardo’s scientific investigations have been overshadowed by his other work. They have also been overshadowed by Isaac Newton, whom the author sets up as an avatar of the mechanistic model for scientific work, the antithesis of Leonardo’s “holistic and ecological” approach. Leonardo’s failure to publish his findings also delayed recognition of his scientific work until long after his death. The case for Leonardo as scientist rests largely on his mirror-written notebooks, some 6,000 pages of which survive. His science is visually oriented, Capra contends; drawings in the notebooks contain object lessons in anatomy, geology, mechanics and a host of other disciplines. A concise summary of Leonardo’s life and major work leads to the meat of Capra’s argument. Leonardo’s acceptance of the paradigms of his age does not invalidate his science, the author avers, but rather gives us a context in which to understand it better. He was familiar with Aristotle, Pliny, Ptolemy and the other accepted authorities of classical times, but his paintings and drawings show that he was concerned with finding out things for himself, observing the world as it really was. The drawings are not just studies, but scientific diagrams, Capra asserts. Quotations and illustrations from the notebooks make a formidable case for Leonardo’s empirical knowledge of many natural phenomena that would not be recognized for years to come. It’s possible to accept all this but not share the author’s conviction that Newton et al. somehow got everything wrong. But Capra argues eloquently for his vision of science.
Carefully considered portrait of a true Renaissance man—polemics and all.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51390-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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